I know this is a controversial case which may cause flaming and pitting, but this simply has to be the right result.
There are too many accusations of racism today. More recently the accusations have become more ridiculous like the following:
This law requires a burden like all laws do;
This burden, like all burdens, falls most harshly on the poor;
Minorities make up a higher percentage of the poor than whites;
Therefore
This law is racist.
At some point that accusation has to stop if we are going to have free debate in this country again without going at each other.
These voting laws are eminently reasonable by any definition of that word. You are assigned a polling place. Go to it, and you get to cast a vote, the same as a white dude. How could that possibly be a racial thing?
You do realize that mysteriously in many states there are somehow a lower number of polling places for the population where by some coincidence it just happens to be largely Blacks and Hispanics?
Does the law ensure a fair distribution of polling places? If not it is indeed extremely racist.
Yet in Arizona, there is mail in balloting and no excuse early voting. If they are trying to keep blacks and Hispanics from voting, they are doing a terrible job.
ETA: Do you dispute the facts in Alito’s opinion? How much more could the state do to allow you to vote than if it provided a limo service?
I’m not reading the PDF, I was responding to your Op which didn’t even mention Arizona. So I was replying to the general concept of these voter suppression laws that Red/Purple States seem to be passing currently.
And Kagan’s dissent is just the product of liberal law school thinking. She goes on about how wonderful the Voting Rights Act is. She loves it. But a judge’s opinion should not rest on her personal opinion of the value of the law.
But even taking her love of the law as making it “super law” one should at least realize the reason why it was enacted. It was a creature of another time and originally only to be in place for five years. It was when if you went to register to vote some racist white dude would find a way under a discriminatory literacy test or a fake “vouching” law to absolutely deny you the ability to vote. An absolute denial.
Not a single minority person is denied the ability to vote. Not one. Not in Mississippi, Alabama or anywhere. Nothing in Arizona’s law remotely approaches the unreasonable. Frederick Douglass would be rolling over in his grave over these accusations.
It’s right in the thread title. Arizona; SCOTUS. Also the PDF wasn’t some right wing rant I created to irritate you. It is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, the very topic of the thread.
The general way in which courts have evaluated these kinds of claims is whether the burden is limited, and necessary to accomplish a legitimate purpose.
My impression is that a great many voting process laws of late have in fact had the primary goal of increasing the burden enough that it is sufficient to dissuade poor/brown people from voting, because those people generally do not vote for the party adding to the burden on voting. That process is indeed racist to the core.
The restrictions at question in the Arizona law strike me as being pretty reasonable, and I think that Alito’s reasoning here is pretty solid. The law in question specifies what constitutes a violation of equal voting access, and this doesn’t meet the requirement.
Sure would be nice if we had two political parties who thought that increasing the number of people who vote is a good thing, though.
The two big deals with this election case (and why we need a new voting rights act) are:
Since this case was originally brought, there have been three elections. In the hypothetical where a state passed election restrictions that would be judged unconstitutional by the SCOTUS, they would still have years to run elections with those restrictions - while there may be variations in timing that order of magnitude on something so important is untenable. This is the world we are going to be living in perpetually until preclearance is restored, unless there is a significant shift in the mechanics of our court system.
Constitutional and federal law is very broad about voting rights and the federal government’s ability to protect them. The apparent standard set by this case is that a voting law is discriminatory only if the lawmakers intended to disenfranchise a particular race because of their race, not if they intended to disenfranchise a particular race because that race doesn’t usually vote for them. It’s really hard to understand the legal reasoning for this looking at federal law and the way courts have viewed it in the past. I think this change would be reasonable if we were talking about charging those lawmakers with hate crimes, but if we are actually trying to get laws that don’t suppress a certain race from voting we really need to be striking down both laws.
On point #2, this might be a sign that even with a new VRA. If that is the case then congress is going to have to knuckle up and specifically make universal laws saying states can’t do x, y and z - possibly to even more of an extent then some of the provisions in the “For the People Act”.
But how does this even remotely keep anyone from voting? Did you read Alito’s opinion? Do you disagree with his factual recitation? A person can more easily vote in Arizona than they can get prescription medication or enroll a child in school. Nobody is being denied the ability to vote.
No, the laws were enacted to prevent any attempts at all to try and restrict voting. That’s why all changes in the laws had to be approved, rather than just saying you can’t do X, Y, and Z. They didn’t want them finding some sort of loophole that would still disenfranchise in a way that looked like fair voting.
You are dismissively mischaracterizing the opposition’s views. No one is arguing that they “like” a law. They’re pointing out why the law served a purpose, and why it doesn’t make any logical sense to remove it.
If you think everything is fair, then you don’t need to repeal the law. You can leave it, because everyone is going to do what is fair anyways. The only reason to repeal a law (whether through judicial decision or via legislative action) is to be able to do the very thing that law prohibits.
We have repeated evidence that the purpose of these voting restrictions is to be able to alter the vote. In a democracy, the vote must be sacrosanct. Anything that can make the vote an inaccurate measure of the people’s will allows tyranny. If those in power can modify the vote, then you don’t have a democracy anymore.
This is a fundamental principle that is above everything else, as it’s required for democracy to work. And, yes, that principle is in the founding documents.
None of what I said above is about what I “like”. It’s an argument using principles. And it is 100% a valid strategy when dealing with legal issues. You have to consider not only the original intent and the literal language. You have to consider the purpose for the action in question. You have to consider the will of the people (i.e. the fact the VRA was passed). You have to consider underlying legal frameworks.
The reason conservative justices like to restrict the types of arguments is that, the fewer types of arguments you can use, the easier it is to make them point the way you want. A good justice considers things from all angles, looking at all arguments for and against.
We have evidence that one party in this country is trying to change the vote to stay in power. That’s how dictatorships start, and thus is something we have to prevent. No amount of “but we also do these other bad things” negates any of that.
I guess it comes down to what you mean by “deny.” Do you envision someone turning up to vote and being told, no you can’t, go away? Is there anything less you’d accept as a systematic effort to suppress voting numbers in certain locations and demographics for political advantage?
I’ll admit that I’m not following you. How is getting a ballot sent to my home, having my wife or caregiver handing it to me, me marking it, handing it back to them to put in the outgoing mail, any sort of Jim Crow law?
I don’t have to envision it. It is what happened and why the VRA was passed. As you admitted, it is ridiculous that it would happen now, so the VRA succeeded in its temporary purpose. Nobody is denied the ability to vote or abridged in any way.
You know the answer. Because they deliberately make it harder for people that they believe will vote Democrat to get an ID so that they will be able to vote on said couch.
You can’t ignore the actual issue under issue under discussion, and act like that means you win the argument. Just like you can’t ignore the majority of a post and somehow refute it.
This is not some new conversation that’s never been discussed before. Every single aspect of this has been discussed in threads in which you took part. You can’t treat this thread as starting de novo. Heck, the relevant parts of those discussions have already been mentioned in this thread.
Places where the black population is high have fewer places to get IDs and decreased hours to get them. That’s how the whole system works. That’s the underlying idea.
You’re clearly asking questions that you know the answers to. Please stop.
(And, no you can’t argue that maybe it’s not going on in Arizona, as you used the same argument for many other states.)
I’ll even help. A law was repealed that was designed to stop racism. Thus we know the goal was to allow racism otherwise there would be no reason to have gone to court to get the law struck down.
Please deal with that argument, if you have anything to counter it.
These voting laws are a deliberate attempt at disenfranchising voters who are more likely to vote against the party that wrote and passed them. While they will claim that it’s to prevent fraud, the purpose of these laws is to prevent Republicans from losing elections. Below is the kind of thing that really pisses off the racists in charge.