President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware has enlisted the help of former Obama administration Solicitor General Don Verrelli to argue in favor of loose election laws in the state.
For Biden — who has decried election security laws in states like Georgia as “Jim Crow 2.0” — the looser the election laws the better.
Yet Delaware — the president’s home state — doesn’t have universal mail voting or same-day registration, ever since the Delaware Supreme Court struck both practices down as unconstitutional in 2022. On Wednesday, the state’s highest court heard a case challenging the constitutionality of Delaware’s early voting period and permanent absentee voter list, after a lower court found that both violated the state constitution.
Surely Biden once understood the pitfalls of things like same-day voter registration, having said in 1977 — while representing Delaware in the Senate — that such a proposal “could lead to a serious increase in vote fraud.” But safeguarding elections isn’t as appealing to Biden now as it was back in 1977, because Democrats rely on weak election laws to increase their chances of winning.
So it’s interesting that a top dog from the Obama administration like Verrilli, who is perhaps best known for arguing both the Obamacare and Obergefell cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, was enlisted to argue against the state-level challenge that is no doubt embarrassing to the president.
Opening arguments began Wednesday in the Delaware Supreme Court, with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and former Delaware
