Matt York/AP Photo
The Supreme Court today upheld an Arizona law that forbids the counting of votes cast in the wrong precinct and so-called “ballot harvesting.”
It was the legendary columnist Finley Peter Dunne who first wrote—back in 1901—that the Supreme Court followed election returns. Today’s Court is a little more ambitious than that: It sees its mission as deciding election returns—in Republicans’ favor.
In today’s decision upholding an Arizona law that forbids the counting of votes cast in the wrong precinct and the collecting of ballots, the six Republican operatives on the Court effectively struck down Section 2 of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which forbade state laws that made it disproportionately hard for racial minorities to vote. Eight years ago, the Court’s Republican majority struck down the act’s provisions—in Section 5—that had enabled the federal government to review formerly Jim Crow states’ election practices before they went into effect, and reject them if in fact they were discriminatory.
Today’s decision, penned by Samuel Alito, cited states’ interest in preventing voter fraud as justification for the Arizona laws (and, by anticipatory extension, justification for the swarm of voter suppression laws now being enacted by Republican legislatures across the land). “Fraud can affect the outcome of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight,” Alito wrote. “Fraud can also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.”
Problem is, over the past half-century, there have been more instances of verifiable UFO landings on the National Mall than instances of verifiable voter fraud. The fact that Republicans have worked assiduously to document such fraud and turned up zilch has not deterred the party one iota from citing it as a national problem. The Big Lie of Voter Fraud persists because demographic changes in the nation’s racial composition, abetted by the increasing liberalism of the young, have convinced Republicans that they can only cling to power through voter suppression, for which some justification, however fictitious, has had to be found.
In a sense, today’s decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and the Court’s eight-year-old decision in Shelby County v. Holder take the Republican justices’ ruling in Bush v. Gore—which bestowed the presidency on George W. Bush—and endeavor to raise its consequence to a general principle: Confronted with an election case, the law favors Republicans.
Just in case you had any doubts …
