Texas Dems' new suit against Abbott will quickly die

For the unaware, in the middle of last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott partially tightened his expansion of early voting rules that he had done because of coronavirus.

He had initially allowed counties to have several drop-off stations for in-person submission of vote-by-mail ballots as well as adding a week to early voting.

He pulled back on the "several drop-offs" and cut it to one. 

And now he's being sued. Twice And, in federal, not state court, on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds as well as Voting Rights Act grounds. More here. And here. Complaints are here and here.

This is going to get crushed. And, in fact, the crushing may start with a venue rejection.

Next? There is no First Amendment ground on this case. None, so even if the feds don't bounce this on venue issues, that won't fly.

Second, as the Fifth Circuit rejected the Twenty-Sixth Amendment based attempt to expand vote by mail, the Fourteenth and VRA claims here that are age-based will also be bounced.

Back to state courts it will be, and they'll reject it, too.

Is this unethical by Abbott? Absolutely.

Could it backfire on him, at least a bit, also affecting outer-ring suburban voters? Possibly.

Is it illegal? Most certainly not.

Finally, given this is NOT Judge Marmolejo ruling, it will likely get crushed in state court when sent there. There's really not a lot of parallel between the two cases, legally. Abbott is modifying an executive order which had suspended part of the state's election code on early voting. He's not junking his original modification, nor is he being even worse and trying to tighten state election code. In the straight ticket voting case, it was an attempt to end run an established state law.

So, again, unethical? Yes. Illegal, no. Sorry, Kuff, both on your take, and on your degree of weirdly bromancing Abbott's degree of good action on coronavirus stuff before this in the last graf.