Your down-ballot vote can protect voting rights where the Supreme Court won't

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MSNBC
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.@JoyceWhiteVance: The Supreme Court will not protect our voting rights. Here's who actually might.

Your down-ballot vote can protect voting rights where the Supreme Court won’t
The Constitution requires federal courts to step in and ensure voting rights during the pandemic. But the Supreme Court is doing the opposite.
msnbc.com

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/supreme-court-will-not-protect-our-voting-rights-here-s-n1245120

As we make our way to the polls, either in-person or via mail, we need to remember that in addition to sending elected officials to Washington, D.C., we are voting for governors, state legislators, mayors and, in some states, judges. We don’t talk about it nearly often enough, but our votes in these races are just as important as the ones we cast in the presidential race. The Supreme Court’s decision Monday night in a case involving Wisconsin’s election drives home the importance of these down-ballot races, especially those for state legislative seats.

Voters should make sure that the people they elect to their state legislatures will protect their right to vote. This Supreme Court will not, and it has become far less likely to permit the lower federal courts to do so, either.

The court, especially following the confirmation of its newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, seems increasingly likely to defer to state legislatures decisions regarding what protections their state constitutions provide — or don’t — to voters, even in the middle of a crisis like the current pandemic.

In Wisconsin, the issue involved extending the period for mail-in ballots to be received past Election Day. With more people relying on mail-in ballots given the risks of in-person voting, Wisconsin residents, like so many U.S. voters, worried their absentee ballots wouldn’t be counted if they voted by mail because of Covid-19-related delays in both the delivery and processing of their ballots. So, Democrats asked a federal judge to permit ballots to be counted as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3 and received within the following six days.

The judge authorized the extension, but the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision, ruling that ballots had to be received by Election Day in order to count. Democrats petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case. Although the Supreme Court declined to take the case, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh each wrote to explain why they would permit the decision that ballots must be received by Election Day to stand. Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, to explain that the Constitution required the federal courts to step in and protect the rights of voters during the pandemic.

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