SUPREME COURT MAY UPHOLD VOTING LIMITS
The Supreme Court seemed ready Tuesday to uphold two election restrictions in Arizona and to make it harder to challenge all sorts of limits on voting around the nation.
In its most important voting rights case in almost a decade, the court for the first time considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to voting restrictions that have a disproportionate impact on members of minority groups. The court heard the case as disputes over voting rights have again become a flash point in American politics.
The immediate question for the justices was whether two Arizona measures ran afoul of the 1965 law. One of the measures requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.”
Several members of the court’s conservative majority said the restrictions were sensible, commonplace and at least partly endorsed by a bipartisan consensus reflected in a 2005 report signed by former President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush.
The Biden administration, too, told the justices in an unusual letter two weeks ago that the Arizona measures appeared to be lawful. But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s position that the relevant section of the Voting Rights Act should not be widely used to keep states from enacting more restrictive voting procedures.
Much of the argument Tuesday centered on that larger issue in the case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, of what standard courts should apply to challenges under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The court’s answer to that question could determine the fate of scores if not hundreds of laws addressing election rules in the coming years.
As Republican-controlled state legislatures increasingly seek to impose restrictive new voting rules, Democrats and civil rights groups are turning to the courts to argue that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote, thwart the will of the majority and deny equal access to minority voters and others who have been underrepresented at the polls.
“More voting restrictions have been enacted over the past decade than at any point since the end of Jim Crow,” Bruce V. Spiva, a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, which is challenging the two Arizona measures, told the justices.