Supreme Court Set To Green-Light More Vote Suppression

Vote suppression is on the docket at Supreme Court. 

At issue is whether a Mississippi law, which allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they are received within five business days after the election, is legal given that federal law requires votes to be cast by that day. Most states have similar laws.

Trump has encouraged Republicans to support legislation outlawing mail-in voting and his regime backed the challenge to the Mississippi law, in hopes of halting vote counts that continue after Election Day.

The Republican-led Mississippi legislature adopted the law allowing late arriving ballots to be counted in 2020, during the pandemic. It is being challenged by the Republican National Committee and Mississippi’s state GOP. During more than two hours of argument on Monday, the court’s six conservative justices repeatedly pressed the lawyer for Mississippi on what is required to make a ballot selection fully complete, suggesting that federal law sets out Election Day as the day ballots should be considered final.

The court’s three liberal justices appeared to defend the Mississippi law, noting that federal law allows the states to set their own election regulations. They also appeared concerned the challenge could endanger all early voting and make it harder for members of the military to vote. The Mississippi leaders asserted that under the “plain meaning” of the word “election,” Mississippi voters make their choice by casting and submitting their ballots by the date of the election, even if some of the ballots are not received by election officials until after that day.

The conservative justices' only concern seemed to be that the decision would cause problems for election machinery already in progress, and not whether changing the law makes it more difficult for people to vote. 

Trump and his cult of sycophantic followers have maintained without the slightest scintilla of evidence that mail-in ballots, as well as early voting, are rife with fraud. There has been a constant churn of local and national laws aimed at putting up roadblocks and hurdles to voting, based on these hallucinations about fraud, including the belief that millions non-citizens are voting. A study by the conservative Heritage Foundation came up with fewer than 100 voting attempts by non-citizens in over 25 years. National bills like the SAVE Act are a maneuver that will further disenfranchise voters. 

Similar to Blackstone's ratio: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer", I'd rather see the law allow some fraud to slip through than to see legitimate voters deprived of their right to vote. That's where our legislators and jurists should be aiming.