Justices will hear cases on voting restrictions and climate change

WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court, returning from its summer break, announced Friday it would hear cases on whether voting restrictions in Arizona violated the Voting Rights Act and whether suits by state and local governments seeking to hold energy companies liable for their contributions to climate change may be heard in federal court.

The Arizona case will probably be heard in January, too late to affect the presidential election. But it will give the Supreme Court, in transition after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an opportunity to weigh in on the roiling debate over how elections should be conducted. The case will also test the force of what is left of the Voting Rights Act, which was hobbled after the court in effect struck down its central provision in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.

The case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, concerns two kinds of voting restrictions. One 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.” The law makes exceptions for family members, caregivers and election officials.

In Januar y, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that both restrictions violated the Voting Rights Act because they disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters.

In 2016, Black, Latino and Native American voters were roughly twice as likely to cast ballots in the wrong precinct as were white voters, Judge William Fletcher wrote for the majority in the 7- 4 decision. Among the reasons for this, he said, were “frequent changes in polling locations; confusing placement of polling locations; and high rates of residential mobility.”

In a pair of dissenting opinions, four judges wrote that the state’s restrictions were commonplace, supported by common sense and applied neutrally to all voters.

The appeals court stayed its ruling, meaning that the restrictions will be in place for the November election.

In a second development Friday, the court agreed to hear an appeal from more than two dozen multinational energy companies that object to a state court lawsuit brought by Baltimore seeking to hold them accountable for their role in changing the earth’s climate. The companies want to move the suit to federal court.

The case, BP PLC v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, No. 19-1189, is one of more than a dozen state and local governments around the nation have filed seeking compensation for what they said were injuries caused by the energy companies’ conduct.