As I am sure that pretty much everyone is aware, a remarkable amount of political and legal wrangling followed the recent presidential election. Prior to the 2020 election, many states passed laws or simply set out procedures allowing voters to vote by mailing in or physically delivering ballots prior to Election Day. The reason for these laws was to minimize the negative results of having an election in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has spread as individuals have passed the virus, causing an increasing number of persons to become infected. Antiviral drugs and emergency-use vaccines are about to be released in the second week of December and into January 2021, which means that they would be released several weeks after Election Day. Because the virus is spread from person to person through breathing, persons talking to each other, persons touching objects that have been touched (i.e., infected) by others, and so on, there was a great concern that the gathering of persons at voting booths could easily lead to a large increase in the number of persons infected with the coronavirus. To avoid such an outcome, mail-in ballots were authorized in numerous states so that voters could vote without leaving their homes and risking catching the virus from those outside their home.

Legal challenges to the use of mail-in ballots have been rejected. The U.S. Supreme Court denied injunctive relief in a lawsuit filed by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, which sought to prevent the election from being certified as well as to invalidate all of the mail-in ballots cast in Pennsylvania. As well, the court, voting 7-2, denied Texas' motion to file a complaint that the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia violated the Constitution's elector's clause and the 14th Amendment when they made changes to some of their election rules in response to the pandemic.