Blog

Another OUTSTANDING ruling earlier this morning by the Supreme Court. This one concerns election integrity laws in Arizona, a decision which will likely have nation-wide impact.

Here’s the backstory. There’s a section in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – it’s called “Section 2” – which outlaws discriminative voting practices. That’s an oversimplified explanation, but essentially what Section 2 does is make it illegal to establish voting policies or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, skin color, or being part of a minority group. That’s obviously appropriate, and was necessary to combat things like poll taxes, property ownership requirements, and even literacy tests in order to vote.

Anyway, several years ago, Arizona outlawed ballot harvesting. In a nutshell, ballot harvesting is where political operatives go knocking on doors to collect ballots. We’ve been over this before, but there’s a HUGE list of concerns with ballot harvesting – from voter intimidation to ballot security. So Arizona put an end to that practice and said if you want to cast your ballot, then great, but you’re going to manage and submit your own ballot. That’s certainly reasonable.

Arizona also established another policy which said that voters need to cast their ballots in their assigned precinct on election day. Arizona has 4.2 MILLION registered voters. That state has 27 days of early voting and goes out of its way to accommodate voters. But each election features countless versions of ballots depending on applicable races where those voters live. So from the standpoint of both logistics and election security, you can’t just show up at any random precinct on election day and expect to be able to vote. So again, it’s a perfectly reasonable law.

Well, along came the Democrat National Committee (DNC). They filed a lawsuit against Arizona, claiming those two policies were a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In other words, the DNC thought that if political operatives were prohibited from knocking on your door to collect your ballot, that’s discrimination. And that if you weren’t allowed to vote in any random precinct on election day, that too was discrimination.

Anyway, that case finally worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with Arizona and against the Democrat National Committee. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Alito said that all things considered, “having to identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does not exceed the ‘usual burdens of voting.’”

It’s just common sense! Whether it’s school, or work, of the doctor’s office – any number of places – you show up where you need to be. This notion that it’s somehow discriminatory to ask people to vote in their assigned precinct on election day really speaks to the low expectations the DNC must have for people they claim to represent.

On ballot harvesting, in another embarrassing rebuke of the Democrat National Committee, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s ballot harvesting law had NOT been “enacted with discriminatory intent.” The Court went on to illustrate that the DNC (A) “had presented no records showing how many voters had previously relied on” ballot harvesters, had “provided no quantitative or statistical evidence” of their claim, and (C) failed to produce even one voter who could claim that this law would have made it more difficult for them to vote.

Anyway, today’s ruling does not strip away Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act – nobody wants that to happen, of course. Instead, it signals that Section 2 cannot be used to justify striking down reasonable, non-discriminatory voting laws that states may enact. This is great news as we head into Independence Day weekend.