Voting rights and wrongs

After the last election, with false claims of voter fraud and phony results and specious court challenges and an deadly attempted coup fomented by the president, the U.S. Supreme Court must tread carefully in hearing today’s case involving the landmark Voting Rights Act and do nothing to weaken the protections it offers for the precious franchise of Americans.

The justices will consider an appeal from Arizona after two measures its Republican legislature enacted that were knocked down by a lower federal court. One concerns invalidating votes that were cast from the wrong precinct. In New York, it’s called right church, wrong pew, which means that a voter needs to show up at the correct polling place, but can’t be penalized for going to the wrong table within that polling place.

The other provision at issue puts limits on who may collect and return absentee and other vote-bymail ballots. Republicans use the scary name “ballot harvesting,” but it’s just about legal absentees.

Both of these can and should be addressed on the merits, but the bigger risk is that the court’s conservative majority may use the Arizona case to go beyond the instant precinct and absentee ballot questions and muck around with the Voting Rights Act, particularly Section 2 forbidding a voting rule that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.”

In a 5-4 decision authored in 2013 by Chief Justice John Roberts knocking out a different portion of the Voting Rights Act, he noted that “Section 2 is permanent, applies nationwide and is not at issue in this case.” This time could be different.

The Arizona measures can stay dead and no one will be harmed. Or the court can restore them without gutting the federal law. But don’t undo the weakened protections. As we saw just proved last fall, voter fraud is minute, if it even exists, but voter suppression, or attempted suppression, is widespread. Protect the voters, not the politicians.