The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld two Republican-supported Arizona voting laws they say are intended to ensure election integrity.
The decision, delivered by a 6-3 court split on partisan lines, found that neither law violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and that they were not enacted with racially discriminatory intent. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court's majority opinion. Justice Elena Kagan led the liberals in dissent.
The laws require two things. The first is that a ballot be thrown out if it was cast in a precinct other than the one matching the voter’s home address. The second is a ban on “ballot-harvesting,” a practice in which third-party carriers collect absentee ballots and deliver them for counting.
Alito wrote in his opinion that because the laws gave voters an "equal opportunity" to vote, they were not discriminatory. He criticized the dissent for taking another tack, which focused on the fact that after the laws were enacted, they had a "disparate impact" on minorities, many of whom were voting in the wrong district or participating in ballot-harvesting. --->READ MORE HERE
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The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on Thursday upheld the Arizona statute that bans ballot harvesting and a policy that throws out votes cast by persons in precincts in which they do not reside.
Justice Alito wrote for the majority in a 6 to 3 decision that neither Arizona’s HB 2023 banning ballot harvesting nor the policy outlawing out-of-precinct voting violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which bans racial discrimination.
Alito was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh.
Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor.
“In these cases, we are called upon for the first time to apply Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to regulations that govern how ballots are collected and counted. Arizona law generally makes it easy to vote. All voters may vote by mail or in person for nearly a month before election day, but Arizona imposes two restrictions that are claimed to be unlawful,” Alito wrote in his majority opinion.
“First, in some counties, voters who choose to cast a ballot in person or on election day must vote in their own precincts or else their ballots will not be counted. Second, mail-in ballots cannot be collected by anyone other than an election official, a mail carrier, or a voter’s family member, household member, or caregiver,” Alito continued: --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
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