Court upholds Arizona voting restrictions
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld voting restrictions in Arizona in a decision that could make it harder to challenge other states' voting limits put in place by Republican lawmakers following last year's elections.
The 6-3 ruling by the conservative-majority court fueled new calls from Democrats to pass federal legislation, blocked by Senate Republicans, that would counter the new state laws and make Supreme Court changes that include expanding the nine-justice bench.
The court reversed a lower court ruling in deciding that Arizona's regulations on who can return early ballots for another person and for the state's refusal to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct are not racially discriminatory.
The federal appeals court in San Francisco had held that the measures disproportionately affected Black, Hispanic and Native American voters in violation of a part of the landmark Voting Rights Act known as Section 2.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the conservative majority that the state's interest in the integrity of elections justified the measures.
The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of law.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the court was weakening the federal voting rights law for the second time in eight years.
"What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America's greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about 'the end of discrimination in voting.' I respectfully dissent," Kagan wrote, joined by the other two liberal justices.
Native Americans who have to travel long distances to put their ballots in the mail were most likely to be affected by the ballot collection law. Votes cast by Black and Hispanic voters were most likely to be tossed out because they were cast in a wrong precinct, the appeals court found.
But Alito said the state measures were at most "modest burdens" that did not violate the law.
Election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog that the decision "severely weakened" Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He noted that this decision along with others over the past 15 years have "taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions."
"This is not a death blow for Section 2 claims, but it will make it much, much harder for such challenges to succeed," Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, Law School, wrote.
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was among Democrats who said the high court's decision "raises the sense of urgency for Congress to pass comprehensive voting rights legislation."
Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts called for passage of his legislation expanding the court to 13 justices "to restore balance to our top court."
With Republicans united in opposition to those measures, Democrats first would have to change Senate filibuster rules that require 60 votes for most legislation.
The challenged Arizona provisions remained in effect in 2020 because the case was still making its way through the courts.
President Joe Biden narrowly won Arizona last year, and since 2018, the state has elected two Democratic senators. Arizona's most populous county, Maricopa, has been in the midst of a Republican-led audit challenging last year's vote.
Thursday's Supreme Court ruling comes eight years after the high court took away what had been the Justice Department's most effective tool for combating discriminatory voting laws — a different provision of the federal law that required the government or a court to clear voting changes before they could take effect in Arizona and other states, mainly in the South, with a history of discrimination.
Many of the state measures that have been enacted since then would never have been allowed to take effect if the advance clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act had remained in force.
Left in place was Section 2, with its prohibition on rules that make it harder for minorities to exercise their right to vote. At the heart of the Arizona case was the standard for proving a violation of the law.
Alito cautioned that the court did not on Thursday "announce a test to govern all ... claims involving rules, like those at issue here, that specify the time, place, or manner for casting ballots."
Many Republicans continue to question the 2020 election's outcome, despite the absence of evidence. Republican elected officials in a number of states have responded by enacting restrictions on early voting and mailed-in ballots, as well as tougher voter identification laws.
Lawsuits challenging laws enacted in Florida and Georgia, including a Justice Department suit in Georgia last week, allege violations of the voting rights law.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel called Thursday's ruling "a resounding victory for election integrity and the rule of law. Democrats were attempting to make Arizona ballots less secure for political gain, and the Court saw right through their partisan lies. In Arizona and across the nation, states know best how to manage their own elections."
Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias vowed the legal fight against the new laws would continue, despite Thursday's decision. "If anyone thinks that this decision will stop us from fighting for voting rights, they are wrong. We will fight harder with every tool available to protect voters from suppressive laws," Elias wrote on Twitter.
Kagan pointed to some of the new laws in her dissenting opinion. "Those laws shorten the time polls are open, both on Election Day and before. They impose new prerequisites to voting by mail, and shorten the windows to apply for and return mail ballots. They make it harder to register to vote, and easier to purge voters from the rolls. Two laws even ban handing out food or water to voters standing in line," she wrote.
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Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed to this report from Atlanta.
California can't collect charity top donor names
By Jessica Gresko
Associated Press
The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered California to stop collecting the names and addresses of top donors to charities, calling the state's requirement a "dragnet for sensitive donor information."
The justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines to side with two nonprofit groups, including one with links to billionaire Charles Koch. The groups argued that California's policy of collecting the information violates the First Amendment.
The nonprofits had drawn strong support from groups across the political spectrum, including The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
California had defended its policy by saying that the information's collection was necessary to prevent fraud. But Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a majority opinion joined by the court's other conservatives that there is a "dramatic mismatch" between California's interest in preventing wrongdoing by charities and its donor information requirement.
"The upshot is that California casts a dragnet for sensitive donor information from tens of thousands of charities each year, even though that information will become relevant in only a small number of cases involving filed complaints," Roberts wrote.
He later added: "We have no trouble concluding here that the Attorney General's disclosure requirement is overbroad."
In a dissent for the court's three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned of the decision's consequences.
"Today's analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull's-eye. Regulated entities who wish to avoid their obligations can do so by vaguely waving toward First Amendment 'privacy concerns,'" she said.
California had required all charities that collect money from state residents to give the state an IRS form identifying their largest contributors. The information is not supposed to be disclosed publicly. Just three other states, Hawaii, New Jersey and New York, require charities to provide the IRS form.
A federal appeals court had upheld California's practice, ruling that the information serves the important state goal of preventing charities from committing fraud. The information was unlikely to be released publicly, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said.
The two groups that had challenged California's requirements are the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center and the Virginia-based Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a charitable organization connected to the primary political organization supported by Koch and his brother, David, who died in 2019. Koch's organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Republican candidates and conservative policies, making them frequent targets of attacks by Democrats.
Both groups argued that their contributors had in the past suffered harassment and threats and that California had in the past let the donor information become public.
In a statement, an attorney for the Thomas More Law Center called Thursday a "great day."
"This opinion safeguards our client's donors from the threats of governmental misuse and public disclosure of their identities and addresses — whether intentional, mistaken, or by electronic theft," Louie Castoria said.
Americans for Prosperity Foundation CEO Emily Seidel said in a statement that the decision: "protects Americans from being forced to choose between staying safe or speaking up."
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he was disappointed by the decision.
"As the People's Attorney, my office has the responsibility to protect charitable assets for their intended use and ensure that donations go towards their intended purpose. Stripping our office of confidential access to donor information — the same information about major donors that charities already provide to the federal government — will make it harder for the State to fight fraud and prevent the misuse of charitable contributions," he said in a statement.
The Biden administration had argued that California's requirement should stand but that the justices should send the case back to the appeals court for a fuller analysis of whether the two charities themselves should have to comply.
The presence of the Koch organization in the case prompted three Democratic lawmakers to ask Justice Amy Coney Barrett to sit out the high-court dispute or explain her decision to take part. That's because Americans for Prosperity, Koch's main political arm, said it would spend more than $1 million dollars last year in support of Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation, said Democratic Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia in a letter to the justice. Barrett was among the six conservative votes for the nonprofits.
