The largest effort in history to expand access to voting by mail is underway, with lawsuits filed in at least 16 states to ensure people can exercise their rights even during a dangerous pandemic. Political partisans and voting rights advocates alike are fighting in court to ensure every vote is counted in November and everyone who wants to vote has the opportunity.

And, in the lower courts, theyre winning.

A judge in Nashville, Tennessee, ruled in June that the evidence does not support the states argument that it would be impossible to drop its stringent requirements to obtain an absentee ballot during the coronavirus pandemic. With that decision, Tennessee joined the vast majority of states in allowing anyone to obtain an absentee ballot for the 2020 election.

In South Carolina, a federal district judge ordered the state to drop witness requirements for absentee ballots for its June primaries. The same happened in Minnesota. Plaintiffs in both cases are still suing to apply these changes to the November general election. In spite of opposition from President Donald Trump , who has baselessly claimed that voting by mail will lead to mass fraud even though he and top allies have voted by mail this year and in years past, there is infinitesimal evidence of mail-in voting fraud.

The current times we are in, where voting in person can pose a significant threat to your health, denying vote-by-mail is unconstitutional, said Danielle Lang, a voting rights lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center. It is not a convenience.

The vast majority of the vote-by-mail lawsuits have been brought by Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias through the party-linked nonprofit Priorities USA and on behalf of other groups. Elias has been involved in vote-by-mail lawsuits in 14 states so far in 2020. Voting rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, League of Women Voters and Campaign Legal Center have also filed suits in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri and Tennessee, among other places. A voting rights team at the law firm Arnold & Porter is also engaged in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

To expand voting access, challengers are focusing on a handful of laws they argue are unconstitutional barriers to the right to vote during the pandemic. They include ballot return deadlines, signature matching rules, witness or notary signature requirements, the lack of prepaid postage, and restrictions on the ability of third parties to collect mail-in ballots and return them en masse.

While lower courts are knocking down mail-in voting barriers in state after state, the U.S. Supreme Court so far appears disinclined to follow suit. In April, the courts five conservatives rolled back a lower courts extension of absentee voting in Wisconsin. Then, on July 2, the conservative justices stopped a lower courts ruling from going into effect in Alabama that would have extended early voting and dropped mail-in voting restrictions like the witness requirement. In both cases, the four liberal justices dissented.

The most common litigation is happening over ballot return deadlines, the one area of the law where the Supreme Court has already accepted some changes. In many states, mail-in ballots must be returned by election day, or sometimes even before, to be counted. But this routinely punishes voters whose ballots may have been postmarked prior to election day, but did not arrive in time to be counted.

The deadline is the single biggest threat of disenfranchisement for voters, said Dan Jacobson, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter. Because frankly its not their fault the local election officials dont have the capacity to process the number of applications in the timely manner needed based on that deadline.

Ballots Left Uncounted