Wisconsin Votes Today, SCOTUS Says No Extension For Absentee Voting | RBG Says Conservative Colleagues’ Reasoning “Boggles The Mind”
April 7, 2020
TOUGH IT OUT
|Yesterday the Supreme Court came down with a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines refusing to extend the deadline for absentee voting in today’s elections in Wisconsin. It’s the first ruling from SCOTUS in a case arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, although the court’s decision did not focus so much on the pandemic as it did on the implications of late changes in election rules. Emphasizing that they saw this case as “narrow” and hinged on a “technical question,” the five conservative justices reasoned that Democrats “put forward no probative evidence in the District Court that these voters here would be in a substantially different position from late-requesting voters in other Wisconsin elections.”
BOGGLES THE MIND
|Writing for the four liberal justices in their dissent, JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG held very little back in her response to the court’s decision on Wisconsin’s election. She wrote, “The court’s order, I fear, will result in massive disenfranchisement.” And while the conservative majority made its reasoning as narrow and focused on the election as possible, Ginsburg acknowledged the context of the moment by focusing on the virus. “The court’s suggestion that the current situation is not ‘substantially different’ from an ‘ordinary election’ boggles the mind,” she wrote. “Because gathering at the polling place now poses dire health risks, an unprecedented number of Wisconsin voters — at the encouragement of public officials — have turned to voting absentee…About one million more voters have requested absentee ballots in this election than in 2016. Accommodating the surge of absentee ballot requests has heavily burdened election officials, resulting in a severe backlog of ballots requested but not promptly mailed to voters.”
A SIGN OF WHAT'S TO COME
|Josh Gerstein with POLITICO reports that critics of the Supreme Court’s decision regarding today’s election in Wisconsin say justices “acquiesced in forcing voters to literally put their lives on the line to cast their ballots.” Gerstein notes the outcry from those concerned by the high court overruling two lower courts and possibly disenfranchising hundreds of thousands. Gerstein heard from University of California law professor RICK HASEN that the sharp divide in the justices’ decision-making “was deeply troubling because it heralds that the justices will be unable to find consensus in a tsunami of legal battles certain to unfold this fall as election officials accept and reject proposals to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic.”
WHAT'S MY AGE AGAIN
|The Supreme Court also ruled yesterday to make it easier for older federal workers to sue for age discrimination. Voting 8 to 1, the justices rejected a Trump administration position that sought to dramatically limit the legal recourse available to federal workers. JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO wrote for the court majority and JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS was the only dissenter.
PULL OVER PLEASE
|Adam Liptak with The New York Times reports that SCOTUS yesterday ruled “police officers may stop vehicles registered to people whose driver’s licenses had been suspended on the assumption that the driver was the owner, rather than, say, a family member.” JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS wrote for the majority and only JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR dissented. She wrote, “The majority today has paved the road to finding reasonable suspicion based on nothing more than a demographic profile.”