The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing two election cases in Arizona on March 2, including a case to prohibit the counting of non-district ballots and a case to prohibit the mass collection of ballots by third parties. The plaintiff, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, hopes the cases will serve as a national example to prevent a repeat of the 2020 election fraud in the future.
Ban on reading non-district ballots
One of the cases is Brnovich’s lawsuit against the Arizona Democratic National Committee (DNC), according to the Washington Times. The state’s election law prohibits the counting of non-district ballots, but in 2016 the state’s DNC took the state to court on the grounds that the law discriminates against minorities, claiming that Hispanic, African-American and Indian voters in the state were unable to get to the polls because their families were too poor to find transportation to the polls.
A local Superior Court dismissed the charges, upholding Arizona state law. The court’s investigation found that 99 percent of the state’s minorities voted in the correct precincts as required by state law, so the state’s state law did not intentionally discriminate against minorities.
The state’s Democratic National Committee then took the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the district court’s ruling and found that the state’s state law affected more than a tiny minority of voters, and therefore found that the state’s act was discriminatory in intent.
Brunovich, who took the case and the state’s DNC to the Supreme Court, said in court that the case was an attempt by liberals to challenge state law, and that state legislatures must have the right to enact common sense election statutes and not worry about them being overturned by unelected officials based on their own preferences, saying, “To do otherwise would lead to uncertainty in elections and and would create confusion.”
Ban on third-party mass ballot collection case
Another case involves Arizona’s H.B. 2023. This bill would prohibit the mass collection of ballots by third parties by requiring that early ballots from voters in the state be submitted to state campaign officials only by Family members, or by caregivers or mailers.
The state’s Democratic National Committee says the law violates the Second and Fifth Amendments to the Elections Act and is discriminatory because Indians, other minorities, and the poor in the state may not be able to receive or send mail-in ballots and therefore need third parties to collect them.
So the state’s Republicans took the case and the state’s Democratic National Committee to the Supreme Court as a result.
Brunovich: Hopes for a common sense set of regulations for U.S. elections
Brunovich said that while the justices asked him a lot of very tough questions on the court, six of the nine Supreme Court justices, who are conservative, seemed to accept Arizona’s view that the court should indeed evaluate the legality of those state laws. The three liberal justices on the court, on the other hand, took a dim view of Arizona’s state laws.
Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute’s Supreme Court Review argued that the Supreme Court justices may end up upholding Arizona’s state law, which is quite commonly applied in the United States. “The problem now is the need for justices to set the standard for elections,” he said. He believes that if the Supreme Court does not set a clear standard for elections in this case, it could lead to another flood of election complaints after the 2022 and 2024 elections.
The 2020 election saw massive anomalies and fraud in key U.S. swing states, including the elimination of voter signature verification and the massive collection of mail-in ballots by third parties. After the 2020 election, former U.S. President Donald Trump‘s camp filed a series of general election fraud complaints, but then states began certifying election results and almost all of his complaints were not heard well.
Brunovich told the court that a large number of American people believe there was wrongdoing in the 2020 election, and none of that wrongdoing was taken seriously by most election officials, so the public is concerned about the integrity of the U.S. election. He hopes the Supreme Court will finally rule in favor of the state’s state law and create a set of common sense regulations for future U.S. elections.
The Supreme Court could announce its decision as early as June of this year.
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