Tight races in New York state could — with control of the House on a razor’s edge — decide who wields the Speaker’s gavel in 2025. So is the Empire State’s highest court again going to give the Democrats a leg-up on Election Day, as New York Republicans contend, by okaying relaxed absentee ballot-counting procedures? That’s the question in the pending case of Amedure v. New York, set to be argued at Albany on October 15.

A win for Democrats in Amedure at the state’s high court would follow an earlier victory in which a Republican challenge to the state’s Early Mail Voting Law was rejected. That case paved the way for the wider use of no-excuse absentee voting — which raises concerns about increased voter fraud. With races as close as they are across New York state, procedural changes like the ones backed by the Democrats could prove decisive on November 5.

The law in question makes Amedure “one of the most important and consequential election integrity cases to be initiated in New York State in recent memory,” Erie County’s Republicans say. It “weakens many of New York State’s longstanding election integrity safeguards,” meaning that “candidates, campaign volunteers, and party leaders no longer have the tools or the ability to properly and effectively review absentee ballots.”

Viewed in connection with the high court’s recent decision to rubber-stamp no-excuse absentee ballot voting in New York, the cases could amount to a one-two punch against the GOP in the Empire State. That would be music to the ears of Democrats, who have embraced the cause of absentee voting, early voting, and other such adulterations to what now seems like a quaint tradition: voting in person on Election Day.

The custom of going to the polls on Election Day to vote in person isn’t just a cranky preference, though. It used to be seen as a rite of democracy, especially because it implied that one’s vote was cast privately. With absentee ballots, who’s to say if votes are being cast in the same solitude as in the voting booth? That’s why voters used to need an excuse, like illness or travel, to get an absentee ballot. Now, it’s becoming more or less a free-for-all.

In-person voting is also an expectation implied in New York’s Constitution, observes the Empire Center’s Cam Macdonald. He calls the rise of no-excuse absentee voting “a substantial departure from the history of New Yorkers promoting election integrity.” Since the state’s founding in 1777, he observes, New York “has promoted in-person voting by secret ballot,” only with “exceptions by constitutional amendment as circumstances have required.”

These traditions spurred the GOP’s objection to New York’s looser ballot counting rules in Amedure. An appellate panel in August upheld the law, noting — in a possible nod to one of Vice President Harris’s rhetorical flights — that the disputed election law “exists in the context of all the procedural safeguards that come before it.” * Yet two judges dissented, noting the law “has the potential to inhibit the rights of New Yorkers to cast their ballot by preventing objections to a ballot cast by someone else in their name.”

The split in the appellate panel fast-tracked Amedure to reach the state’s high court just in time for the election. While New York seems poised to back Ms. Harris on November 5, the closeness of several House races means “this is a swing state,” a New York Post editorial observes. “In this crucial way, the nation’s future is in New York voters’ hands,” the Post adds. All the more reason to ensure that voting procedures are held to the highest standards of integrity.

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* “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” the vice president observed in May 2023.