supreme court latest decisions voting rights

Supreme court latest decisions voting rights how to#

The Court cannot articulate a rule that precludes the states from imposing any burdens on voters and makes running election systems impossible. It is also true, however, that states must impose burdens on voters in order to run an electoral system, and given our racially stratified society, voters of color are likely to bear disproportionate costs for rules that are both neutral and legitimate. The first is to ask: Under what circumstances do ostensibly neutral voting rules impose impermissible burdens on the ability of voters of color to exercise their right to vote? Given America’s racially stratified society, and the fact that some states continue to pass voting laws that discriminate against voters of color, electoral rules will too often impose disparate burdens on voters of color. There are two ways of framing the problem in Brnovich. But that would be a legitimate and reasonable disagreement among people who share a joint enterprise: How should we, the legal and political system, protect voters of color from having to disproportionately bear burdens in our voting system? The problem with Justice Alito’s opinion in Brnovich is that the majority seems wholly uninterested in participating in that joint enterprise. Had the Supreme Court followed the district court’s lead, one could disagree, even vigorously, with that opinion. To see what a reasonable opinion that ruled against the plaintiffs would look like, read the district-court opinion in the case, which found that the Arizona laws were not enacted with a discriminatory intent and the laws did not have disparate impact on voters of color. One could understand an opinion concluding that the challenged laws do not make it sufficiently harder for voters of color to exercise their right to cast a ballot, which would make them okay under the VRA. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether the specific electoral rules at issue-the wrong-precinct rule or denial-of-assistance-by-third-parties rule-impose undue burdens on voters of color. The Court’s opinion in Brnovich is deeply problematic, but not because the majority reached the wrong result. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a fiery dissent, which Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined. In an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s six conversative justices agreed with the defendants. The district court ruled for the defendants, but the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, siding with the plaintiffs. The defendants argued that the laws did not violate Section 2 because they were neutral voting laws that regulated the time, place, and manner of voting-the kinds of things that states are empowered to do under the Constitution.

Supreme court latest decisions voting rights how to#

Read: American democracy is only 55 years old-and hanging by a threadīrnovich was about Section 2 of the VRA and was the Court’s first opportunity to determine how to apply the section to claims alleging denial of the right to vote. Section 2 of the VRA prohibits the government from providing “less opportunity” for voters of color “to participate in the political process.” It protects voters from voting rules that are intended to or have the effect of discriminating on the basis of race. The plaintiffs argued that these laws violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, along with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. A second law prohibited third parties, such as voting-rights activists, from collecting mail-in ballots from voters who were unable or unwilling to submit those ballots themselves (though it expressly allowed caregivers and family members to do so). One law required voters to cast their ballot in their assigned precinct or else their vote would not count.

The Democratic National Committee, along with other plaintiffs, challenged two Arizona voting laws that it argued discriminated against voters of color. Democratic National Committee is only the latest case, and certainly will not be the last, to interpret the act in a manner that will sideline it-permanently. The Court’s decision last week in Brnovich v. For the past decade or so, the Supreme Court has systematically reduced the scope and reach of the law. Once thought of as the crown jewel of the Second Reconstruction, the VRA has lost its luster.

The Voting Rights Act regime as we knew it is gone, and it’s not coming back.