Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Law to Insure the Integrity of the Vote and Outlaw "Ballot Harvesting"

Some good news. Wow, Trump's "conservative" justices actually voted conservatively for once.

Thank God for small favors.

"Ballot harvesting" is a I-can't-believe-this-was-ever-legal practice of paying hard partisans to "harvest" the ballots of third parties, supposedly to "help" them vote.

Most people strongly suspect that the "ballot harvesters" are simply collecting the ballots of dead people and out-of-state people and simply casting votes themselves.

Numerous races have gone from Republican leads to Democrat "victories" when the Democrat-paid "ballot harvesters" suddenly turn in thousands of ballots in the closing moments of vote counting.

The Arizona law also requires votes cast by voters who vote in the wrong precinct to not be counted.

This is, again, an area rife with fraud. The only chance a criminal impersonator has to be caught casting a false vote in someone else's name is to be recognized at the precinct by the poll worker -- or recognized not to be the voter in question.

Permitting fraudsters to cast votes in other precincts where the person they're supposed to be is not known to anyone seems intentionally designed to permit Democrat fraud.

The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined in the majority with Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer in the dissent, which was written by Kagan.

What it boils down to is the Court upheld the state's ability to prohibit third-party collection of mail-in ballots, otherwise known as "ballot harvesting" and said that the state can also disallow votes cast in the wrong precinct.

That’s a huge blow against the Democrats because of how they have utilized ballot harvesting. Many believe that they are able to use it, perhaps questionably, to change the nature of elections. Republicans have been fighting against it for some time to make elections more secure.

Democrats had tried to argue that the restrictions disallowing votes in the wrong precinct were somehow racially discriminatory. The court rejected that argument and it's a good thing. The very argument is itself racist -- to suggest that somehow people of color don't know what precinct to vote in.

Responding to the Democrats' (and the 9th circuit's) claims that these "restrictions" disproportionately hurt minorities, the Court found that everyone had an equal opportunity to vote either in person or by early voting, and, in any event, the state's strong interest in insuring that only legal votes be cast and counted would trump the very minor "disparate impact" the laws may (or may not) have on minorities.

The Court notes as a starting matter that Arizona "makes it quite easy to vote."

That is true. And it seems to me that if your state "makes it quite easy to vote" and yet you insist on creating ways for people to vote without identifying themselves, you're only trying to make it "quite easy" to cast fraudulent ballots.

The full decision is here.

posted by Ace at 02:20 PM

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