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The British state itself is similarly veiled in convention and ceremony, its power and legitimacy ultimately rooted in public consent rather than force. This is Britains grand bargain: authorities only as powerful as their legitimacyvery powerful at times, very weak at others. Consent is a measure that naturally ebbs and flows with events and the governments handling of them. It can produce the force and certainty of Margaret Thatcher, and the calamitous vacuum of Theresa May.

The very ties that bind the states power, though, also reinforce it. When public consent for its authority exists, expressed with a solid majority in the House of Commons, there are few limits on the British executive; its power is constrained only by politics and convention, a liberal political culture, and established, albeit comparatively weaker, institutions. And while customs, conventions, and norms are traditionally seen as guarantors of stability, they can also be used as tools of change. The historian Peter Ackroyd writes in Foundation, a history of England, that custom is the essential feature of the country. Instead of fighting customs, skillful rulers in British history have used them to advance new ends. Any institutional or administrative change, introduced by the king and council, had to be explained as a return to some long-lost tradition, Ackroyd writes. Any innovation that had endured for twenty or thirty years then in turn became part of ancient custom. Thus, the British constitution weaves back through time, each knot connected to something before, but always changing. The Bill of Rights of 1689, establishing the supremacy of Parliament, is connected to the Magna Carta, which itself, Ackroyd writes, is linked to a haphazard collection of principles that existed before that. Change is veiled in continuity.

Today, new norms are being established, executive powers exercised, and police guidance issued. In time, case law will develop, legislation will be passed, political pledges made, and national stories told. Changes, adaptations, and innovations will imprint themselves on our collective consciousness. Many of these powers and ways of working will outlast the current moment and apply to the next in ways we cannot foresee.

Through the course of this lockdown, then, innovations risk stealthily becoming part of our established way of life because we have become used to them and have (temporarily) consented to their introduction: digital surveillance, perhaps, or police drones. At their most fundamental, these changes might also mean the normalization of freedom being enjoyed by some and not others for reasons of biology rather than behavior.

Read: A guide to staying safe as states reopen

The risk in situations like this is, you get used to it, David Davis, a libertarian and former Conservative cabinet minister, told me. When we get to the end of this pandemic, [the authorities] will talk about the next pandemic and will be unwilling to get rid of the powers theyve now got. Whenever you get into one of these situations, theres a danger of an involuntary reseta reset of our constitutional standards, in which some norms get wiped.

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Our Democracy Will Survive This Pandemic - The Atlantic

Written by T M Krishna | Updated: May 20, 2020 9:38:20 am Being Left means confronting and questioning all socio-political mechanisms that enable these discriminating practices.

I am not aware of the reasons that pushed Jaggi Vasudev to pen a column (I am more left than you think, Sadhguru, IE, May 15) claiming that he is far more left than people can imagine, but not crazy left. But it has exposed his lack of understanding of the Left, communism, democracy, social inequalities, citizenship, liberty, suffering, freedom, power structures and oppression.

He claims that Isha Yoga Center is indeed absolute left, a commune. By using the term commune, he is either confusing the reader or believes that communism flourishes in a commune. There are many types of communes and his is consumed within the ideas of a single individual himself. His commune is a great example of Karl Marxs often-quoted phrase, religion is the opium of the people. Just because everyone wears saffron or white, cooks, eats, washes dishes and participates in activities together, the space does not become equal. Institutions that create mindless followers who do not challenge the power structure controlling them cannot claim equality.

Vasudev explains in his piece: The Isha Yoga Center is a commune in a way, it is a communist arrangement. Nobody is asking how much you have, your religion, caste, where you come from, who your father is. We will treat you like we treat everyone else. If you rise and show some special qualities, we will honour that as well.

Being left (and this comes in so many shades) includes recognising and grappling with issues of religion, caste, gender, political and economic marginalisation. Which means, confronting and questioning all socio-political mechanisms that enable these discriminating practices. So, by claiming that nobody is asked about their religion, caste etc, Vasudev is only reiterating the fact that his Center is a perfect example of the upper-caste privileged milieu where markers of discrimination are brushed under the carpet because everyone is expected to transform into that ideal curated by the socially powerful. He is only paraphrasing the often-heard upper-caste quote, we never discuss caste or religion in our houses. He must learn that equal opportunity occurs only when unequalness is acknowledged and this means enabling and listening to the voices of those at the receiving end. Vasudev needs to feel uncomfortable with his own words.

He claims, One aspect of this is that they (liberals) feel only they should have freedom of speech and nobody else. Odd, coming from this person of enormous power who disdainfully trivialises pertinent questions, often laughing them off in condescension. Unlike his claim that those on the left are just living in their own home, talking left philosophy, people of the left cut across our social spectrum, many belonging to sections of society that do not have a voice, including daily wage workers and agricultural labourers, just ordinary people.

Democracy and rights are not within his intellectual grasp. Here is a person who believes that it is the job of the citizen to support any government that has been elected by the majority. Citizenry involves being actively watchful of the government. This is a participatory democracy, where the role of the citizen is not just to vote, but to be a partner in the process of building a just society. Decisions are not only made within the precincts of Parliament, but also by consulting the public; this is the magnificence of our democracy.

To this end, protests on the streets are central. Vasudev forgets that we gained our independence only because people came out on to the streets. He forgets that the Nirbhaya Act and the RTI Act were passed because people protested in public spaces. So, we will occupy public spaces, not allocated lots. Of course, public property cannot be destroyed, but disruption is essential and is a positive idea. Here is a person who allows himself to be called a mystic missing the essence of a philosophical enquiry.

Vasudev seems to think it is easy for every citizen to go to court. If you do not agree with the law, there is a court where you can go. If it is in any way illegal, it will get knocked down. Villagers sit on highways, people oppose CAA-NRC-NPR at Shaheen Bagh when their voices are unheard and suppressed. For a person who professes concern for people and has set up processes for inner engineering, he lacks empathy and the understanding of those on the margins of society.

And finally, this person of spirituality calls those in the Opposition and citizens who oppose the government losers. Vasudev is clearly an autocrat who considers democracy a veneer behind which control should remain with the powerful.

This article first appeared in the print edition on May 20, 2020 under the title Unequal Spaces, Hidden Power.

The writer is a musician and the author of Sebastian And Sons: A Brief History of Mrdangam Makers

The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines

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Being left is about recognising and grappling with various kinds of marginalisation - The Indian Express

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman, as we turn from the Electoral College to the issue of voting from home and the question, Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic? Thats the headline of this weeks New York Times Magazine cover story.

In it, reporter Emily Bazelon writes, quote, Two-thirds of Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November, according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center. A successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called absentee balloting the terms are synonymous) than have ever done so before. Its also important to make adjustments to keep polling places open for people who dont have stable mailing addresses a group that increases as people are uprooted during an economic downturn or whose disabilities, like blindness, make it hard to fill out a ballot unassisted, she writes.

This comes as President Trumps son-in-law, senior adviser Jared Kushner, was asked by Time magazine this week if he thought the election would be held in November.

BRIAN BENNETT: Is there any scenario, including a second outbreak in the fall, where the elections move past November 3rd?

JARED KUSHNER: Thats too far in the future to tell. Nothing that Im aware of now, but, again, our focus right now is just on getting the country

BRIAN BENNETT: Well, will you commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd?

JARED KUSHNER: Its not my decision to make, so Im not sure I can commit one way or the other. But right now thats the plan.

AMY GOODMAN: Thats Jared Kushner being interviewed by Time magazines Brian Bennett. Too far in the future to tell?

Well, for more, were joined by Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Again, her cover story asks, Will Americans Lose Their Right to Vote in the Pandemic? Shes also the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School.

Also with us is Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, whos quoted in the piece. Colorado is one of five states that send ballots by mail to every registered voter.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why dont you start with that, Emily Bazelon, Jared Kushner saying its too far in the future to tell whether the elections will be held in November?

EMILY BAZELON: So, Congress passed a law in 1845 setting the date of the election on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Its very precise. It would take both houses of Congress to change that law. It has nothing to do with Jared Kushner. And I assume that he didnt know anything about that when he tried to answer that question.

AMY GOODMAN: So, lets talk about your piece. You begin in Wisconsin, that amazing moment. Explain what happened with that primary.

EMILY BAZELON: Wisconsin had a really difficult election on April 7th. There was a lot of confusion leading up to the election about whether it was going to happen. The governor tried to postpone it. He is a Democrat. The Republican-controlled Legislature said no. The governor also proposed sending absentee ballot applications to all the registered voters in the state. The Republican Legislature also refused to do that. The election challenges to the election went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, and they refused to also postpone the election, by splitting on ideological lines.

So, there were many, many more people trying to vote by mail in Wisconsin than had ever done so before. They went from 3% to over 70%. And that was really hard for local election officials to handle. They got behind on mailing out ballots. There were probably about 12,000 people who didnt get their ballots in time to vote.

The other problem was there were cities that could only open a few polling places, because a lot of their poll workers, a lot of them older, didnt feel safe working the polls. So you saw these very long lines of people trying to social distance, standing in line to vote. And unfortunately, there have been some coronavirus infections that were linked to the polls that day.

AMY GOODMAN: How many, do you expect?

EMILY BAZELON: The last time I checked, it was over 50.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to ask you about that moment in the Wisconsin primary, which really laid bare the voting crisis that coronavirus poses here. The election took place, as you said, on April 7th, after this protracted battle between the Democratic Governor Tony Evers and the states Republican Legislature. After the state Supreme Court blocked Evers ruling to delay the election 'til June, thousands of voters braved the statewide remain-at-home order and queued in these long lines to cast ballots. In Milwaukee, home to Wisconsin's largest African American community, just five of the citys usual 180 sites were open.

And what went viral we want to turn to this clip its Wisconsins Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos defending his support for in-person voting during the deadly pandemic, while wearing a surgical mask, gloves and hospital gown at a polling place.

ASSEMBLY SPEAKER ROBIN VOS: Everybody is here safe. They have very minimal exposure. Actually, theres less exposure here than you would get if you went to the grocery store or you went to Walmart or you did any of the many things we have to do to live in the state of Wisconsin.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Robin Vos saying its perfectly safe. Hes covered head to toe. Emily Bazelon?

EMILY BAZELON: Right. So, I think the response of a lot of voters was, You may feel safe, because you have all the protective equipment you need, but we dont. And you have forced us today to choose between our health and safety and being able to exercise our right to vote.

AMY GOODMAN: So, lets take this national, and what this means, what has to happen. The cover of The New York Times Magazine is a mask, and on the side of it is a little I voted sticker. And on the inside of the piece is a mailbox with covered in I voted stickers. Lets talk right now about the significance of mail-in voting, in a way that people havent felt perhaps the urgency before.

EMILY BAZELON: There are many states in the country, the majority of states, where you can request an absentee ballot, and you dont need to make an excuse. You dont have to say Im sick or Im traveling. You can just ask for one. However, a lot of those states have never rolled out a huge mail-in election before. So, Jena Griswold, your other guest, she comes from Colorado. Her state, she knows how to do this. Theyve done it before.

In my state of Connecticut, only, in the past, 3 or 4% of people have voted absentee in previous elections. So, you imagine, if Connecticut, if 50 or 60 or 70% of us want to vote absentee this time, the state is going to have to change how they do business. Theyre going to have to order much, much more paper. Theyre going to have to make sure that they have relationships with vendors that can handle an order like that. They need new machines to tabulate votes. They need to train election officials to verify signatures and make sure the ballots are OK to be counted.

This is a huge task. And its a logistical task. Its like planning for testing and tracing in the pandemic. It takes advance planning and organization, and it takes a lot of money. And that is a big burden on the states that they are just starting to ramp up for. And they, as yet, do not have adequate funding for that from Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, Emily, I think, for the first time, perhaps, most Americans now understand what supply chain is all about, because when it comes to tests, when it comes to masks, that have been so woefully inadequate in this country, what planning means again, the election is in November. So, lets bring Jena Griswold into this conversation, Colorados secretary of state. Explain exactly how the system works in Colorado, Secretary.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: So, we believe in accessible voting. So we have online voter registration, early voting for several weeks before Election Day, same-day voter registration. And then, the big one, we mail a mail ballot to every registered voter. And to share with you the results, in just our presidential primary, 97.5% of Coloradans voted at home.

AMY GOODMAN: Say that number again, and compare it to how many people vote nationally in the United States.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: Sure. So, in our presidential primary, 97.5% of Coloradans voted their mail ballot. And to put that into perspective, not only do we have the highest rate of registered eligible people in the nation, we also have the highest turnout rate consistently. So, our presidential primary, we surpassed the turnout rate of every other state in the nation, with almost nearly everyone voting their mail ballot.

Now, it is important to maintain in-person voting, which were about to do for our June 30th statewide primary, because there are going to be some people who, for different reasons, just cant vote that mail ballot.

But the bottom line is, mail ballot needs to be expanded nationally as soon as possible. Wisconsin should serve as a wake-up call. If we do not expand national ballot, not only will Americans have to choose between safeguarding their health and casting a ballot; what I do fear that were going to see is the pandemic used to suppress turnout. And if we have too low of turnout, that really affects the legitimacy of an election.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Trump, to get your response to what he said. This was in an interview on Fox & Friends, where he was celebrating the fact that the $2.2 trillion stimulus package left out provisions by Democrats in earlier versions of the bill that would have expanded voting access.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: If you look at before and after, the things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, youd never have a Republican elected in this country again.

AMY GOODMAN: He continually also attacks mail-in voting, though he does that himself. I want to get Secretary Griswold, and then Emily Bazelon, talking about what Trumps opposition to this means.

SECRETARY OF STATE JENA GRISWOLD: Well, I think, in this instance, President Trump was very straightforward: He opposes mail ballot because he thinks Republicans will lose seats. Not only is it reprehensible to put politics above Americans health and force Americans into unhealthy voting, having really crowded polling locations, not enough polling locations thats bad in itself. But on top of it, its just untrue. Colorado shows that Republicans can win in mail ballot systems. A U.S. senator has won. Many statewide officials have won on the Republican side under our system. So the claim that it benefits one side more than the other just isnt true.

And at the end of the day, if this nation does not act, we will see Republicans, Democrats and independents all deciding whether to sit out the November election. Thats not good for our democracy. And frankly, thats not good for President Trump, either. And I wish he could recognize that.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Bazelon, if you could also respond to this point hes making, that Republicans will lose if more people vote?

EMILY BAZELON: Yeah, its really interesting, because the research shows what Secretary Griswold was pointing to, which is that voting by mail does not actually have a partisan effect. Its neutral. It doesnt help Democrats; it doesnt help Republicans. What it does do is boost turnout. And so, there is this assumption that President Trump and some other Republicans make this assumption, as well that if more people vote, they are more likely to lose.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask about the repeated attacks on vote-by-mail by people, of course, other than by President Trump, by Republicans claiming to be attacking voter fraud. In Georgia, the new secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has announced an absentee ballot fraud task force to investigate signature mismatches and other issues. In your New York Times Magazine piece, you quote Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action, who says the task force is a submission to the Trump voter-suppression machine. Explain.

EMILY BAZELON: So, yes. In Georgia, I think the concern of voting rights advocates, like Lauren Groh-Wargo, is that people will hear theyre going to be investigated if they vote by mail, and theyll get nervous about it. And that will intimidate them in a way that will discourage voting.

I think its also important to connect this to a longtime voter suppression tactic among conservatives. So, you go back to the '60s, you had poll taxes, literacy tests, to try to prevent African Americans from voting. Then we have the Voting Rights Act. It becomes illegal to do things like that. But you start to see a push for voter identification at the polls. And the justification for voter ID laws was we're preventing fraud.

So, it turns out theres almost no fraud at the polls. If you think about it, it would be really hard to turn an election by having people show up and vote twice. Youd need a lot of people to do that and get away with it. It just isnt really a problem.

And so, that does not stop conservatives and a lot of Republicans, however, from making this charge over and over again. Were seeing it now with a complaint about voting by mail, even though states like Secretary Griswolds, with a really good track record and practically universal voting by mail, have very low levels of fraud.

And you also see it with something called purging, which is this idea of cleaning up the voter rolls by cutting people off of them if they havent voted for a while or if their names dont exactly match in other databases. And similarly, the rationale given for purging the rolls is to prevent fraud.

But the reality of fraud is just much, much smaller really tiny compared to the amount of people who end up with barriers to voting for these reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: Emily Bazelon, is the Trump campaign spending its election money on efforts to limit voting by mail?

EMILY BAZELON: There is at least $10 [million], I think now its up to $20 million, that the Republican National Committee has set aside for lawsuits relating to the election. You know, this is perfectly normal. The Democrats are spending money on lawsuits, too. But the Republicans are doing things like challenging an all-vote-by-mail primary in New Mexico, a conservative group challenging a similar effort in Nevada.

And then we also are seeing the Republicans just gear up for election monitoring, for their efforts on the day of the election, for the people who do vote at the polls, you know, perhaps to interfere with their right to vote. That is something that has happened in the past. Theyve been blocked from doing whats called ballot security for many years because of a consent decree they agreed to in the 1980s. But that consent decree will be gone for the first presidential election in 40 years. And so thats another potential for spending this kind of money on.

AMY GOODMAN: The military has been doing mail-in voting for what? Two hundred years?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, yeah. It started in the Civil War. Youre right. Thats where we get the idea of absentee balloting from. There was actually a struggle through World War I and World War II over how much absentee balloting soldiers would be able to do. But yes, they have been doing it this way for a long time.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let me conclude where we started, with the title of your New York Times piece::https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/magazine/voting-by-mail-2020-covid.html: Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, it certainly can. South Korea just had a completely calm and orderly election. People voted by mail. They also socially distanced at the polls. It went fine. Theres no reason why America cant do this. And we still have time. But its an urgent task to get everything ready. And because Congress hasnt passed the funds to make that easily possible, I think this is a time for kind of concern and paying a lot of attention to this issue.

AMY GOODMAN: What would it cost?

EMILY BAZELON: Well, the estimates from the Brennan Center for Justice are $4 billion. That would include all the primary elections as well as the general election in November. So far, Congress has pledged only $400 million. So you see theres a really big gap there. And that is really hamstringing some of the states.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Emily Bazelon, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, we will link to your cover story, Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic? And I want to thank Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, joining us from Denver.

And that does it for our broadcast. The amazing Democracy Now! team is working with as few people as possible on site, the majority of our team working from home. Special thanks to our general manager, Julie Crosby. Democracy Now! is produced with Rene Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Libby Rainey, Nermeen Shaikh, Carla Wills, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Adriano Contreras and Mara Taracena. Special thanks to Miriam Barnard, Denis Moynihan, Paul Powell. Im Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.

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Can Democracy Survive the Pandemic?: Election Hangs in the Balance as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting - Democracy Now!

Among the questions that loomed after September 11, 2001, was how intelligence agencies would handle the power theyd acquired through a confluence of unprecedented public license, massive funding, and new technology.

As the internet fuelled a post-9/11 revolution in covert capabilities, that explosion in resources funded a multinational empire of contractors, freelancers, and off-the-books operatives. The degree to which that powertelegraphed in the early post-9/11 narratives of the Iraq intelligence fiasco and the reporting that legitimized itundermined democracy in the worlds sole superpower was evident in the hacking of the Senate Intelligence Committee by the CIA over the post-9/11 torture report and the Edward Snowden revelations of global surveillance by what had become a borderless behemoth of intelligence agencies, including Canadas.

Two decades on from 9/11, its hard not to be struck by the irony that a fateful power shift from elected to unelected hands in Washington and elsewhere, justified by the need to protect democracy and uphold freedom, has produced a global bedlam of bullying authoritarians, stolen elections, weaponized imbeciles, and hourly instalments of intelligence-style, intelligence-insulting narrative warfare that has commodified deceit on an unprecedented scale.

The intelligence community has been the dog that didnt bark in the battle against what has proven to be a greater threat than terrorism to the rules-based international order: a reality-hijacking cocktail of corruption, propaganda, andfor lack of a less melodramatic, more accurate termweaponized evil; a Third World War waged with an industrial escalation of disinformation campaigns, deception operations, psychological warfare, and every other trick inEspionage for Dummies.

If the intelligence community isnt fighting fire with fire in a war its ideally equipped to win, whatisit doing?

Much of this has been rationalized by the concurrent, two-decade expansion of Chinas power as the bad cop in a systematic degradation of democracy and American influence across the globe. In their annual threat report before Congress in February 2019, U.S. intelligence officials offered an explanation for the past two decades preposterous even by todays stratospheric standards of preposterousness.

While we were sleeping in the last decade and a half, China had a remarkable rise in capabilities that are stunning, said then-director of national intelligence Dan Coats.

You do not have to have spent the past two decades as an intelligence asset, target, or operative to know that the post-9/11 era has been anything but drowsy for spooks. What were those doubled intelligence budgets spent on if not the gathering, analyzing, and acting upon of information about a geopolitical power realignment so obvious to the naked eye that some of us wrote quite a few words about it in real time, including from Washington? The War on Terror didnt come with blinders to the rest of reality and was not conducted by somnambulists.

How does a dog not only not bark but not twitch during an assault so brazen that it produced the relentless, deadly lunacy of Donald Trumps presidency and still spend$500 billion? If the intelligence community wasnt bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against global anti-democracy interests, who was it bugging, tracking, hacking, and counter-operating against?

Now, with a global pandemic being leveraged as a power grab by those same anti-democracy interests and a presidential election under attack by not just Russia and other usual suspects, but also by the incumbent himself, can the intelligence community marshal its formidable outcome-curating powers to thwart corruption, restore sanity, and save democracy?

Taking public responsibility for the integrity of the process that will produce Novembers U.S. election result might be a good start. If that fails, at least people will know precisely what sort of war theyre dealing with. It seemsso far, at leastits not a cold one.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and was a Washington and New York-based editor at UPI, AP, and ABC. She writes a weekly column for The Hill Times.

The Hill Times

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Can the intelligence community save democracy? - The Hill Times

A federal court on Tuesday rejected an appeal by the New York Board of Elections and ruled the state's Democratic presidential primary must take place on June 23 as scheduled, a decision that supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang celebrated as a win for democracy.

"We expect New York to work to make voting safe, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying to disenfranchise New York voters." Faiz Shakir, campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld District Court Judge Analisa Torres' May 5 ruling that ordered New York to restore Sanders, Yang, and other Democratic presidential candidates to the ballot after state election officials voted to remove them last month.

Yang and seven other New York residents sued the state Board of Elections over the decision on April 28.

"The removal of presidential contenders from the primary ballot not only deprived those candidates of the chance to garner votes for the Democratic Party's nomination," Torres wrote, "it deprived Democratic voters of the opportunity to elect delegates who could push their point of view in that forum."

Three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirms ruling that New Yorks June 23 presidential primary should go forward. Kudos to @AndrewYang for pressing this pro-democracy fight, and to voting rights advocates and to @BernieSanders and his backers for amplifying it. pic.twitter.com/MEGXm9WeTb

John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) May 19, 2020

Douglas Kellner, co-chair of the New York Board of Elections, said in a statement after Tuesday's ruling that there are no plans to file an appeal with the Supreme Court.

Faiz Shakir, Sanders' campaign manager, said the ruling "confirmed what we knew: the state of New York acted illegally in trying to cancel the Democratic presidential primary."

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"With today's decision, which affirmed the District Court's recent ruling, we expect New York to work to make voting safe, rather than wasting taxpayer money trying to disenfranchise New York voters," said Shakir. "This ruling is a victory for democracy. Congratulations go to Andrew Yang, his delegates, and our delegates for standing up to this abuse of power."

Yang celebrated the ruling on Twitter.

"Thrilled that democracy has prevailed for the voters of New York!" Yang tweeted.

New York election officials claimed the effort to cancel the presidential primary was driven by concerns about spreading Covid-19, but critics said that justification did not make sense given that down-ballot races are still scheduled to take place on the same day.

"One can't help but see this as the New York Board of Elections trying to protect machine Dems from insurgent progressive primary challengers," Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos wrote last month.

Fordham University law professor Zephyr Teachout, a Sanders supporter, tweeted that Tuesday's ruling affirms that "you can't just say 'pandemic' and give away unconstrained power to change ballot rules."

"Good," said Teachout.

Read more here:
'Democracy Has Prevailed': Federal Court Rules NY Primary Must Go Forward With Sanders, Yang, and Others on Ballot - Common Dreams