OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Many people still feel chafed about what happened in the 2020 presidential election, with a number of people believing that changes made to voting laws were not fair.
The Supreme Court is now stepping in to hear a case that involves two Arizona election laws, one of which involves ballot harvesting, NBC News reported.
Two Arizona laws are at issue in the virtual oral arguments before the justices. One requires election officials to reject ballots cast in the wrong precincts. The other concerns voting by mail and provides that only the voter, a family member or a caregiver can collect and deliver a completed ballot.
“Prohibiting unlimited third-party ballot harvesting is a commonsense means of protecting the secret ballot,” the state told the justices in court filings. The out-of-precinct rule is intended to prevent multiple voting, Arizona said.
But Arizona Democrats said the state has a history of switching polling places more often in minority neighborhoods and putting the polls in places intended to cause mistakes. Minorities move more often and are less likely to own homes, resulting in the need to change polling places, Democrats said.
Arizona far outpaces other states in discarding out-of-precinct ballots, rejecting 11 times more than the next-highest state. And minority voters are more likely to need help turning in their ballots, the challengers said. In many states where the practice is legal, community activists offer ballot collection to encourage voting.
A federal judge in Arizona rejected the challenges. But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, so the state appealed to the Supreme Court.
The court will also hear a challenge to the Voting Rights Act which court significantly changed in 2013.
The Act used to require that states who had a history of being discriminatory in their voting laws obtain permission from courts or the Department of Justice prior to making any election law changes.
In 2013 the Court got rid of the preclearance formula because it said that Congress has not updated the formula to determine which states should be covered under the Act.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a state’s election rules could be blocked if they were determined to disproportionately affect the ability of any racial minority from being able to vote or their candidates of choice and exercise their right to vote if the state in question has historically enacted laws that discriminate against said minority group. It ruled that two of the Arizona had laws failed those legal tests.
Republicans in Arizona contend that the legal test should require proof that the law in question disproportionately affects the minority group. In other words, arguing that a law that would close the polls a half hour earlier should also take into account other means of voting such as early voting and mail-in voting.
But the state’s Democrats contend that the law does not require anyone to prove a “substantial disparity” and that no requirement exists to meet a minimum number of affected minority voters, ostensibly meaning if one minority voter is affected then the law could be successfully challenged.
The American Civil Liberties Union said in a friend of court brief, that the Arizona law would impose “a categorical approach under which laws that are relatively commonplace, or that do not make voting altogether impossible, are largely immune from liability.”
But Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and other Republicans argued that the interpretation of the law that Democrats advocate would endanger any neutral voting law if it resulted in a problem voting when “a challenger identifies a minimal statistical racial disparity related to the law — and then points to completely separate, long past, invidious voting discrimination.”
The Supreme Court is set to issue its ruling this summer.
