What if states pass a voting law that there can be only one voting place and one voting machine per 100 square miles? That sounds like equality, doesn’t it, except if one district has 5 million voters and another has 500.
Or what if states pass a voting law that no vote can be cast after 5 pm, even if the line is stretching a mile (in that place where 5 million voters are online at one voting place)?
Or what if states empower partisans to reject absentee ballots they deem to have signatures that don’t quite match?
Or what if states decide to purge all voters with the last name Lopez or Brown because a Lopez or a Brown was on some list or hadn’t voted in the last election, without informing them they have been purged or giving them the ability to redress the problem?
Or what if states give a wink and a nod to partisans who send out the wrong polling place and time, so that they can then reject those ballots without giving the voter any recourse to vote by provisional ballot?
According to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, all of this is A-OK since the law applies to all voters, no matter if the law is used disproportionately against some demographic groups over others.
And by the new standard he has invented, if many states adopt the same voter suppression laws (as crafted for them by ALEC or the Heritage Foundation), that makes them even more valid.
In 2021 alone, Republicans have introduced over 404 voter suppression bills in 48 states, including Georgia, Texas and Florida. And in the 28 states controlled by Republicans, these are being steamrolled through.
In his majority opinion in Brnovich v. DNC, Justice Alito invents an entirely new threshold to overturn a law that suppresses voting.
Basically revealing his extraordinary bias as the basis for his decision, Alito wrote “the size of any disparities in a rule’s impact on members of different racial or ethnic groups is also an important factor,” adding that courts may discount disparities “to the extent that minority and nonminority groups differ with respect to employment, wealth and education.” Sounds like his standard for voting is what was in the original text: only white males with property can vote.
And he showed he was all-in on using the Big Lie that voter fraud had anything to do with the 2020 election to “legitimize” his ruling.
“Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight,” he wrote. “Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.”
Except that there was no evidence of voter fraud to justify Arizona’s voter suppression laws – or any of the other 60 cases Trump brought to try to overturn the 2020 election.
You know what else tips the balance in a close election? Barring specifically targeted voter populations from the polls, rejecting ballots using arbitrary standards in order to disqualify targeted populations, and effectively overturning results that the ruling party doesn’t like.
Rather than voter fraud (nonexistent) nullifying votes, a state that suppresses votes in order to get the outcome it desires nullifies the will of other states – not only in the representation in the House and Senate but in the Electoral College. And it doesn’t take a bunch, just a few states (for example, Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin).
As Justice Kagan noted, only 10,000 votes in Arizona determined the winner of the 2020 presidential election (Biden) and giving him those electoral votes to hit the magic number of 270.
Justice Kagan took the radical rightwing extremists to task, citing in her fiery dissent “a significant race-based disparity in voting opportunities,” and blasting the majority’s list of guideposts as a recipe for voter suppression.
“The list — not a test, the majority hastens to assure us, with delusions of modesty — stacks the deck against minority citizens’ voting rights,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Never mind that Congress drafted a statute to protect those rights — to prohibit any number of schemes the majority’s non-test test makes it possible to save…Elections are often fought and won at the margins — certainly in Arizona.”
She added, “What is tragic here is that the court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute [the 1965 Voting Rights Act] that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.'”
What this Supreme Court decision means is that the scores of legal challenges against the flood of state voter suppression laws may well be dismissed under Alito’s newly fabricated standard.
The function of the Supreme Court – the “originalist” conservatives have claimed over and over – is to make sure laws adhere to the strict wording of the Constitution (actually that was not determined until Marbury v. Madison in 1803). But the right-wing extremists who have dominated since 2000 have clearly demonstrated they intend to use their power to reshape laws and lives and advance a political agenda.
Indeed, the language of the Constitution – the 14th and 15th Amendments – is plainly on the side of equal access to the vote – the most foundational right upon which rest all the other rights we Americans hold dear.
But voting rights are under multi-pronged assault (you might call it a conspiracy).
So in addition to passing the federal Voting Rights Act, which set minimum federal standards for access to the ballot and protection of free and fair elections (this necessitates ending the filibuster), there needs to be reform of the Supreme Court: expanded to 13 (to redress the three seats stolen by Mitch “Machiavelli” McConnell); term limits instead of lifetime appointments, so that every president gets to select a judge within a four-year term; ethics reform so that a Justice Barrett can’t refuse to recuse herself on a case involving her father’s company, or a justice can’t go hunting with a defendant in a case (Scalia and Dick Cheney); barring the ability of the Federalist Society and influential donors to buy seats on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
