U.S. Supreme Court gives states more leeway to restrict voting

• Conservative judge makes 6-3 verdict; Liberals disagree
• Biden condemns the verdict and “major attack” on the right to vote

July 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday made it easier for states to put voting restrictions in place by advocating Republican-backed measures in Arizona that a lower court ruled disproportionately burdensome black, Latin American and Native American voters and inflicted a defeat on the Democrats that had called politics into question.

The 6-3 judgment, authored by Conservative Judge Samuel Alito, found that restrictions on third party voting and where ballot papers may be cast did not violate the Voting Rights Act, a pioneering federal law of 1965 that prohibits racial discrimination in elections.

President Joe Biden and other Democrats condemned the Arizona decision and a second one, also passed by judges Thursday – the final day of sentences for the court’s current nine-month term – in a California case that contained some disclosure laws political donor could endanger. In both judgments, the court’s six conservative judges were in the majority, with the three liberal judges disagreeing.

Various states have adopted sweeping Republican-backed voting restrictions following the false claims made by former President Donald Trump about widespread electoral fraud when he was defeated by current President Joe Biden in 2020.

“This broad-based attack on the right to vote is unfortunately not unprecedented, but it is taking new forms. It is no longer just about a dispute about the electorate and about making it easier for the electorate to vote. It’s about who gets to count. “The voice and whether your vote counts at all,” said Biden.

The Arizona ruling makes it difficult to prove violations of the Voting Rights Act. This could complicate a June 25 lawsuit by the Biden administration challenging new Republican-backed voting restrictions in Georgia under the Voting Law. Georgian law went so far as to forbid the distribution of water or food to voters waiting in long lines.

The ruling clarified the boundaries of the Voting Rights Act and how courts can analyze claims for electoral discrimination.

The “mere fact that there are some differences in effectiveness doesn’t necessarily mean that a system isn’t equally open or doesn’t give everyone the same choice,” Alito said.

In a devastating disagreement, Liberal Justice Elena Kagan called the verdict “tragic” and noted that gross efforts by some states in the past to block access to voting, such as “reading and writing tests”, prevented blacks from voting to prevent, gave way to “more and more new forms of discrimination” since the court gutted another part of the voting rights law in 2013.

“So the court is ruling this suffrage case at a moment dangerous to the nation’s commitment to equal citizenship, predictably depriving members of minority groups of equal access to the ballot box,” Kagan wrote.

Voters line up at a polling station to vote in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in the Hispanic majority neighborhood of Maryvale in Phoenix, Arizona, the United States, on November 3, 2020. REUTERS / Edgard Garrido

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The case is a 2016 Arizona law that made it a crime for election officials, other than family members or caregivers, to give someone else’s completed early ballot papers. Community activists sometimes participate in the ballot collection to facilitate voting and increase voter turnout. Collecting ballot papers is legal in most states, with various restrictions. Republican critics call the practice “ballot harvest”.

The other controversial restriction was a long-standing Arizona policy of discarding hand-cast ballots in a different district than the one a voter was assigned to. In some places, the constituencies are not the closest to where you live.

“INTEGRITY ASSURANCE”

The decision came in an appeal by the Arizona Republican Party and the state’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich against a ruling by the US 9th Court of Appeals in San Francisco that ruled the two restrictions unlawful. The Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party had sued over the restrictions.

“Today is a victory for electoral integrity in Arizona and across the country,” said Brnovich.

Democrats have accused state-level Republicans of taking voter suppression measures to make it difficult for racial minorities who tend to support Democratic candidates to vote. Many Republicans have instituted new restrictions as a means of containing electoral fraud, a phenomenon that, according to electoral experts, is rare in the United States.

“A strong and perfectly legitimate state interest is the prevention of fraud. Fraud can affect the outcome of a tight election,” and undermine public confidence in elections, Alito wrote.

The Arizona ballot collection law was spurred on by a widespread video allegedly showing voter fraud that a judge later found had no illegal activity at all.

The Arizona litigation concerned a specific provision called Section 2 of the Voting Act, which prohibits electoral policies or practices that lead to racial discrimination. Section 2 is the main tool to show that electoral restrictions discriminate against minorities since the Supreme Court in 2013 repealed the part of the law that established which states with a history of racial discrimination require federal approval to do so Change electoral laws.

Biden said the ruling “makes it clearer than ever that additional laws are needed to protect the beating heart of our democracy”. The Republicans in the US Senate blocked Democratic-backed laws on June 23 that would broadly expand the right to vote and establish uniform national voting standards to offset the wave of new Republican election restrictions in the states.

Reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington and Andrew Chung in New York; Adaptation by Will Dunham

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