Courts continued this week to invalidate some of the extraordinary rules under which President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and to which many Republicans objected, though litigation at the time failed to overturn the voting results.

An appellate court in Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the state’s 2019 law — passed by a Republican legislature before the coronavirus pandemic — allowing no-excuse vote-by-mail was unconstitutional. A challenge to the same law after the 2020 general election was blocked by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on the grounds of “laches,” because the plaintiffs could have brought their lawsuit before the primary election. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal to that decision.

Earlier this month, a judge in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County ruled that the vote-by-mail drop boxes that the state had used in the 2020 election were unlawful because rules for their use had not been created through a traditional administrative process.

Wisconsin, like other states, adopted the widespread use of the drop boxes after Democrats raised concerns — unfounded in science — that voting in person posed an unreasonable risk of transmission of COVID-19. (Israel and South Korea, two of the most restrictive countries in the world with regard to coronavirus lockdowns, each held in-person elections during the height of the pandemic. Neither allows large-scale absentee voting; in Israel, coronavirus patients had their own polling places.)

Though these lower-court rulings could later be overturned on appeal in each state, the rulings underline the controversy over the circumstances in which the 2020 vote was held.

Many Republican-led states have passed laws to tighten ballot integrity rules; Democrats have claimed that these new laws are an attempt to suppress minority votes, and have proposed sweeping legislation at the federal level to institutionalize the “temporary” voting changes of the pandemic and limit states’ authority.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.