Supreme Court to debate voting rights case that advocates worry will limit access to polls

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

WASHINGTON – Eduardo Sainz was standing at the front door of a home in Tucson, Arizona, encouraging the family inside to vote when the young man and his mom asked for a favor that under the state’s current law would make him a felon.

Sainz, state director of the Latino advocacy group Mi Familia Vota, said neither the young man, who was in a wheelchair, nor his mother had a car or the time needed to mail their ballots before Arizona’s gubernatorial election in 2014. They asked Sainz to drop off their ballots on his way home – and he agreed.

"It made the difference between participation and their ballot sitting on a shelf and not being counted,” said Sainz, whose group collected thousands of votes in similar encounters before the state banned such handoffs. “It was a connector to democracy.”

Five years after Arizona criminalized what critics call "ballot harvesting," and four months after a presidential election in which the practice was bitterly debated, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a pair of cases that will determine when states may limit voting and, potentially, whether a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act will stand.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-court-debate-voting-rights-100149332.html

[ananda]

1. I'm getting really depressed about what's happening to the vote.

It's really getting to me.

Should I be this distressed and worried about it?

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

2. Justice Scalia argued that there was no right to vote in the Constitution.

He said only states can grant citizens the privilege of voting. Of course, it’s easy to criticize for differentiating between having a right and not being denied a right. The Supreme Court, however, would disagree. Justice Antonin Scalia, in Bush v. Gore, continuously reminded lawyers that there is no explicit right to vote in the United States Constitution. The majority opinion agreed: “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States” (Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104 [2000]).

Republicans would be happy to end voting entirely and let themselves be the ones who got to pick the president. I think this last election proves that. Arizona now is deciding whether to have a law allowing the legislature to throw out the results of the election and choose whomever they want -- which in 2020 would have been Trump, of course.