The Supremes heard a case today about whether or not elections officials can count ballots that have been postmarked on or before election day but arrive later. It went about as you might have expected, via TPM:
Voting by mail has become a contentious, political issue in the last several years, primarily fueled by President Donald Trump claiming falsely that it helped his shadowy enemies steal the election from him in 2020. Faced with the inconvenient reality that voting by mail is not actually rife with fraud, many of the conservative justices had to content themselves with increasingly hallucinatory what-ifs. An inordinate amount of time on Monday centered on the possibility of voters “retracting” their votes, a complicated and rare procedure. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas obsessed over the granularities of having a neighbor or relative drop off a voter’s ballot in their stead.
Many on the right sounded Trumpian in their feigned concern about voting fraud.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh fretted over the chance that late arriving ballots would prompt cries of fraud, creating a “perception” that lawful elections might appear rigged. As has become rote for the Court’s conservatives, in the absence of any actual evidence of voter fraud, they fell back on the impossible-to-substantiate risk that people might think something fishy is going on.
These rabbit holes, which tripped up Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, distracted from the meat of Monday’s attempt by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to make voting by mail harder to do because Democratic voters have used it more in recent history.
The GOP had long been a prime proponent of mail-in voting even as they were rending their garments over non-existent voter fraud long before Trump. This particular innovation is all Trump.
But it’s not the only one, it sounds like Alito is all in on Trump’s inane contention that all voting must be on election day (and probably that only votes counted on election day can count.)
“We have lots of phrases that involve two words, the second of which is ‘day,’” began the Princeton and Yale-educated Justice Samual Alito. “Labor Day, Memorial Day, George Washington’s birthday, Independence Day, birthday and Election Day,” he continued, “birthday” apparently so compelling as to warrant double-dipping.
“They’re all particular days — so if we start with that, if I have nothing more to look at than the phrase ‘Election Day,’ I think this is the day in which everything is going to take place,” he concluded.
Why they think all this is only going to hurt Democrats I’ll never understand.
This is the real kicker:
While the Roberts Court attacking voting rights has long been a dog bites man story, the action it’s at least seriously contemplating is extreme: ripping up a routine, widely practiced state policy on the grounds that Congress actually meant federal law to forbid it, but it just randomly hasn’t come up until now.
And the Court is considering doing this months before the midterm elections, a seemingly clear violation of the Purcell principle: the idea that courts shouldn’t change how elections work too close to them, so as to not confuse voters. But the Court has become comfortable applying the rule sparingly, only when people likely to vote Republican are at risk.
Good luck with making a rule that the law only applies to Democrats. But if anyone can do it, this conservative majority can. They are rank partisans and increasingly aren’t even trying to hide it.
