Conservative justices make it clear: they won't stop anti-democratic voting laws
In a hugely consequential ruling last week, the US supreme court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions and, in the process, significantly curtailed one of the most powerful provisions that remain of the Voting Rights Act.
No one was particularly surprised the Arizona measures were upheld – the Biden justice department filed a letter with the supreme court saying it did not object to them. But when I spoke with voting rights lawyers earlier this year, they were cautiously hopeful the justices might find some way to preserve the measures without dealing too much of a blow to the Voting Rights Act. That didn’t happen – the court’s majority opinion, authored by Samuel Alito, unequivocally narrows the law and gives lawmakers powerful ammunition to pass more restrictive voting laws.
It is the latest in a string of cases from the supreme court in which justices have made it clear that they will not stop anti-democratic voting laws. In 2013, the court dealt a huge blow to the Voting Rights Act, gutting a provision that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election laws pre-approved by the federal government. In recent years, the court has approved of excessive partisan gerrymandering and aggressive voter purging, and repeatedly declined to step in last year to expand voting access as states grappled with elections during the pandemic.
The Arizona case deals specifically with section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any voting rule that denies equal access to the ballot box based on race. It is a provision that civil rights lawyers have long used to challenge the boundaries of voting districts, but they have also turned to it more recently to challenge discriminatory voting practices and policies, such as overly-restrictive voter ID requirements and cuts to early voting.
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