Supreme Court rejects fringe elections theory [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

This theory never made sense to me

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https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-ruling-moore-harper-north-carolina-elections-rcna87123

The Supreme Court rejected the fringe, GOP-backed "independent state legislature" theory in a 6-3 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts.

State legislatures don't have exclusive and independent authority to set federal election rules, Roberts wrote, over dissent from Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

Heading into this Supreme Court term, which started in October, voting rights proponents feared Moore v. Harper. The elections case from North Carolina raised the fringe theory that could give state legislatures across the country unfettered control over federal elections.

As MSNBC columnist Jessica Levinson explained in December:

If ... the Supreme Court accepts the broadest version of the independent state legislature theory, then state lawmakers will, with few exceptions, have exclusive power to make decisions about federal elections. Those decisions might involve whether there’s early voting, how many polling places there are and where, if voting by mail is allowed and even if the people’s vote for president should be accepted.

But oral argument earlier this term suggested that even a majority of this court wasn't jumping to accept the most extreme version of the theory. Events since the argument, however, raised the prospect of the case going away before it could be decided. That's because North Carolina's Supreme Court, with a new Republican majority hungry to reverse pro-democratic precedents, condoned partisan gerrymandering in an April ruling related to the pending U.S. Supreme Court appeal. Given the intervening developments in North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court raised the prospect that the case could be moot and asked the parties to weigh in on its fate. Yet the court said the case wasn't moot and decided it.