The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Arizona Republican Party in a major voting rights case on Thursday as it wrapped up its first all-virtual term.
By a 6-3 vote, the nation’s high court reversed a lower court ruling in deciding that Arizona’s limits on who can return early ballots for another person and refusal to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct are not racially discriminatory.
A federal appeals court in San Francisco said both measures disproportionately affect minority voters and violated the Voting Rights Act prohibition on discrimination in voting. During arguments in February, the justices seemed likely to upend that ruling and allow the Arizona restrictions to remain in place.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a conservative majority the state’s interest in the integrity of elections justified the measures. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court was weakening the landmark voting rights law for the second time in eight years.
The challenged Arizona provisions remained in effect in 2020 because the case was still making its way through the courts. President Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona last year, and since 2018, the state has elected two Democratic senators.
While in Florida, President Joe Biden said he was “deeply disappointed” in the court’s decision, and renewed his call on Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden are visiting and meeting with rescue crews and relatives of those still missing in last week’s catastrophic condominium partial collapse.
The ruling comes eight years after the high court took away a Justice Department tool for combating discriminatory voting laws — a different provision of the voting rights law that required the federal government or a court to clear voting changes before they could take effect in Arizona and other states, mainly in the South.
Many of the measures that have been enacted since then would never have been allowed to take effect if the advance clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act had remained in force.
Left in place was section 2 of the law, with its prohibition on rules that make it harder for minorities to exercise their right to vote. At the heart of the Arizona case was the standard for proving a violation of the law.
Alito cautioned that the court did not on Thursday “announce a test to govern all ... claims involving rules, like those at issue here, that specify the time, place, or manner for casting ballots.”
Many Republicans continue to question the election’s outcome, despite the absence of evidence. Republican elected officials have responded by enacting restrictions on early voting and mailed-in ballots, as well as tougher voter identification laws.
Kagan pointed to some of the new laws in her dissenting opinion. “Those laws shorten the time polls are open, both on Election Day and before. They impose new prerequisites to voting by mail, and shorten the windows to apply for and return mail ballots. They make it harder to register to vote, and easier to purge voters from the rolls. Two laws even ban handing out food or water to voters standing in line,” she wrote.
In a second closely watched case, the court — in another 6-3 ruling — ruled against California’s donor disclosure requirements for charitable organizations, citing 1st Amendment concerns.
The case brought together a coalition of both liberal and conservative groups in support of two nonprofits that objected to the state’s requirement that they provide the names of major donors.
The information already is provided to the Internal Revenue Service, and California says the information remains private and helps it prevent fraud in charitable giving. But the nonprofits, including one linked to billionaire Charles Koch, say the risk of disclosure could discourage donors.
The court’s last day of work Thursday before its summer break also could include a retirement announcement, although the oldest of the justices, 82-year-old Stephen Breyer, has given no indication he intends to step down this year.
The high court has already issued opinions in its other big cases of the term. In recent weeks, it rejected the latest major Republican-led effort to kill the national health care law known as “Obamacare” and sided with a Catholic foster care agency that had a religious objection to working with same-sex couples.
The justices also sided with students in two cases: barring the NCAA from enforcing rules on certain compensation schools can offer athletes and ruling that a school violated the speech rights of a cheerleader who was kicked off the junior varsity squad for a vulgar social media post.
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