Case Trends: State Courts Shape the Right to Vote

You’re reading our series on 2025 state constitutional trends. All cases are available in our curated State Case Database.

After a wave of blockbuster decisions leading up to the 2024 election — addressing topics like voter identification laws, felony disenfranchisement, and mail-in ballot disputes — state courts this year continued to grapple with fundamental questions about the scope of the right to vote under their constitutions.

While some courts have engaged directly with the meaning of constitutional voting guarantees, others have resolved major election disputes on procedural or structural grounds. The resulting decisions illustrate the growing centrality of state constitutions in defining how, and by whom, elections are run — and who gets to participate in them.

Hurdles to By-Mail Voting

In March, the Washington Supreme Court upheld the state’s signature verification process for by-mail ballots, rejecting a facial challenge under the state constitution.

Most Washington voters cast ballots by mail, and each must sign a declaration affirming their eligibility to vote. Election workers verify the signature against the voter’s registration record before counting the ballot. If the signature doesn’t match, the ballot is challenged — and unless the voter successfully cures it, the vote is not counted.

In Vet Voice Foundation v. Hobbs, the plaintiffs argued this process disproportionately disenfranchised minority voters, young voters, military personnel, voters with disabilities, and non-native English speakers in violation of state constitutional voting rights protections. The court disagreed, noting that Washington has expanded procedures for notifying voters about mismatched signatures and giving them opportunities to cure.

A key issue in the case, as the Brennan Center previously explained, was “what standard of review the court should apply when considering claims that a law or practice violates the free elections clause as well as other state constitutional provisions that protect voters, including Washington’s due process and privileges and immunity clauses.”

The court declined to adopt the federal Anderson-Burdick balancing test for evaluating voting burdens. Under that analytical framework, derived from two U.S. Supreme Court cases, 1983’s Anderson v. Celebrezze and 1992’s Burdick v. Takushi, a court applies neither rational basis nor strict scrutiny. Instead, it is asked to balance the burden on voting rights against a state’s regulatory interests. Rejecting that approach as “nebulous and unclear,” the Washington Supreme Court held that if a law “imposes a heavy burden on the right, it is properly subject to strict scrutiny,” with a “lesser burden” requiring “a lesser degree of scrutiny.” Because the signature verification law survived any level of scrutiny, the court “assumed without deciding” that strict scrutiny applied but did not further define the standard.

The Brennan Center submitted an amicus brief in support of neither party, urging the court to recognize that the Washington Constitution offers stronger voting protections than its federal counterpart and to apply strict scrutiny — the most rigorous form of judicial review — when assessing laws that burden the right to vote. The Brennan Center called the case “a pivotal moment for the future of voting rights,” as federal courts have retreated from enforcing those protections.

In contrast, Pennsylvania’s high court in September struck down a county election board policy on by-mail ballots, ruling that it violated voters’ procedural due process rights.

The case, Center for Coalfield Justice v. Washington County Board of Elections, involved a policy adopted ahead of the 2024 primary elections. Under the policy, all by-mail ballots received into the statewide system were marked simply as “returned,” regardless of whether they were later disqualified. Voters whose ballots were rejected received no notice that their votes would not count. Worse, the board misinformed those voters that they could not vote in person, even though disqualification of their mail ballots would have entitled them to do so provisionally.

In finding a procedural due process violation, the court recognized both a general liberty interest in voting, grounded in the Pennsylvania Constitution’s “free and equal” elections and “qualifications of elections” clauses, and a specific liberty interest in casting a provisional ballot under the state election code. To meet due process, the court held, county election boards must provide accurate notice when rejecting a voter’s mail ballot for disqualifying errors.

Georgia’s Controversial Election Rules

In June, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down four of seven rules adopted by the Georgia State Election board, finding that the rules violated the state’s constitutional nondelegation provision. The decision in Republican National Committee v. Eternal Vigilance Action, Inc.; Georgia v. Eternal Vigilance Action, marks a significant rebuke of the board’s attempt to alter election procedures through administrative rulemaking.

The invalidated rules required hand counting of ballots, directed county election boards to make a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, mandated identification for people dropping off others’ absentee ballots, and permitted board members to “examine all election-related documentation” before certification. The court upheld only one of the five challenged measures — a rule requiring video surveillance of ballot drop boxes outside of voting hours.

The plaintiffs included a former Republican state lawmaker, his conservative election-reform nonprofit, and another member of the group, who claimed standing both as individual voters and on behalf of their organization. The court found that the individual voter plaintiffs had standing to challenge these five rules because they directly affected the right to cast a ballot or have it counted. But the same plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge two others — daily vote-reporting and expanded poll watcher access — because those did not implicate their voting rights. One of these plaintiffs was also a county board of elections member, and the justices remanded to the trial court the question of whether the plaintiff had standing for these remaining two rules in his capacity as board member. The court also held that the organizational plaintiff lacked standing to challenge any of the rules.

As State Court Report discussed, the invalidated rules “would have encouraged county officials to refuse to certify or delay certifying election results in violation of state law.”

Voting Access for Non-English Speakers

Iowa’s high court in June declined to weigh in on whether the secretary of state may provide voter registration forms in languages other than English, dismissing the case for lack of standing.

The plaintiff, the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa (LULAC), sought to dissolve a 2008 injunction that had blocked state officials from disseminating online voter registration forms in languages other than English. Although LULAC was not a party to the original case, it filed a new action — League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa v. Pate — arguing that the earlier injunction was wrongly decided.

LULAC contended that the multilingual voter registration fell within an exception to the 2002 “English-only” law that underpinned the injunction. The statute required most “official documents” to be in English but expressly exempted “language usage required by or necessary to secure” rights guaranteed by federal law or the state constitution.

Providing voter registration materials in other languages, the group said, was essential to ensuring that citizens with limited English proficiency could meaningfully exercise their right to vote. The group cited research showing that lack of access to native-language election materials depresses registration and turnout.

The court never reached those questions. It held instead that LULAC lacked standing, reasoning that an organization’s expenditure of resources in response to a law that does not directly regulate or violate its own rights, status, or legal relations does not constitute a legally cognizable injury.

Noncitizen Voting in Municipal Elections

New York’s highest court ruled in March that the state constitution limits the right to vote to U.S. citizens, striking down a 2023 New York City law that would have allowed certain noncitizens to vote in only municipal elections. The law would have enfranchised lawful permanent residents, Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children and protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — as well as select noncitizens with work authorization, who had lived in the city for at least 30 days. The decision in Fossella v. Adams leaves those residents ineligible to vote in municipal contests.

Noncitizen voting in federal and state elections is strictly prohibited and carries serious criminal penalties. Evidence shows only citizens vote in federal and state elections, with vanishingly rare exceptions. By contrast, noncitizen voting in local elections is neither criminalized nor categorically barred.

Voting rights organizations and advocacy groups — including Common Cause, Dēmos, and the New York Civil Liberties Union — filed amicus briefs defending the law. But a six-judge majority found that the law violated Article II, Section 1 of the New York Constitution, which guarantees a right to vote to “citizens” who meet age and residency requirements. The court first rejected the argument from appellants that the provision merely set a constitutional floor, guaranteeing the franchise to citizens but not forbidding its extension to others.

It next rejected the argument, advanced by appellants and echoed in a dissenting opinion by Judge Jenny Rivera, that Article IX’s broad grant of home rule powers created an exception to Article II’s citizenship limitation. Instead, the majority wrote, “Article IX further reinforces the constitutional bar on noncitizen voting by expressly incorporating” Article II, Section 1.

Intervenors and the New York Civil Liberties Union also contended that “citizen” under the state constitution could encompass more than U.S. citizenship. They pointed to historical evidence that Black voters continued to cast ballots in New York even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision stripped them of federal citizenship. The court dismissed that theory, finding “no known procedure for someone who is not a citizen of the United States to be a citizen of New York.” Even if such a category existed, the court said, there was no indication the city’s law “purport[s] to enfranchise those persons.” Reviewing the state’s constitutional convention debates, it found “a common understanding that the New York Constitution restricted the franchise to U.S. citizens” and “no evidence that any of the amendments changed that understanding.”

Rivera dissented, agreeing that the city’s law was invalid but on narrower grounds: She would have found it a change to the “method of voting” requiring local referendum approval under the state’s home rule provision.

• • •

This year’s voting rights decisions continue to resolve holdover disputes from the 2024 elections — testing the constitutionality of key election procedures and probing the broader scope of the right to vote in federal, state, and municipal elections. Procedural barriers like standing and justiciability have also shaped which of these claims can move forward.

But courts aren’t just wrapping up old fights. As the 2026 midterms approach, new challenges are emerging, particularly around mid-decade redistricting efforts and other voting restrictions. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause foreclosed federal partisan gerrymandering claims, state courts have become the primary venue for such disputes, and, increasingly, for defining the right to vote itself.

Chihiro Isozaki is a counsel in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. 

 Suggested Citation: Chihiro Isozaki, Case Trends: State Courts Shape the Right to Vote, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ(Nov. 4, 2025), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/case-trends-state-courts-shape-right-vote