Supreme Court Seems Ready to Sustain Arizona Voting Limits
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Source: MSN
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court seemed poised on Tuesday to uphold two Arizona voting restrictions, one requiring election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct and the other making it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.”
Several members of the court’s conservative majority said the restrictions were sensible, commonplace and at least partly endorsed by a bipartisan consensus reflected in a 2005 report signed by former President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under President George Bush.
The Biden administration, too, told the justices in an unusual letter two weeks ago that the Arizona measures appeared to be lawful.
The court heard the case as disputes over voting rights have again become a flash point in American politics, with Democrats arguing that Republicans are increasingly trying to suppress the vote, thwart the will of the majority and deny equal access to minority voters and others who have been underrepresented at the polls.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/supreme-court-seems-ready-to-sustain-arizona-voting-limits/ar-BB1eag2t?li=BBnb7Kz
I am not sure why this case is being framed as limitation on voting rights. A law against ballot harvesting is what helped catch a Republican effort to rig an election in North Carolina back in 2018. Also, requiring people to cast their ballots in the correct precinct is pretty common.
https://www.gq.com/story/north-carolina-ninth-district-fraud
Although the 2018 midterms took place ten months ago, one district in the country has gone without an elected congressperson since the new Congress convened in January. On Tuesday, voters of North Carolina’s ninth district will head back to the polls to elect a representative after months of unraveling electoral chicanery.
The district, which extends southeast from the Charlotte suburbs along the state’s border with South Carolina, held an election last November, just like everyone else. It was a close one: Republican Mark Harris, a far-right candidate who defeated Republican incumbent Robert Pittenger in a primary challenge in the spring, defeated Democrat Dan McCready, a then 35-year-old U.S. Marines veteran, by 905 votes out of more than 282,000 cast.
In the weeks that followed, though, state officials uncovered a number of peculiar patterns among mail-in ballots: In all but one of the district’s counties, McCready won handily among these absentee voters, by 16 points. But in Bladen County, he lost by a whopping 24 points. Journalists discovered that the same names appeared on many of these absentee ballots as “witnesses,” and listed the same one-bedroom apartment as their address.
In other words, either a small group of benevolent democracy enthusiasts rented a place together and then traveled all over Bladen County to help strangers vote—or someone, somewhere was cheating. In late November, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted to delay certification of the result until it could figure out what, exactly, had gone awry here.
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