The outcome of Brnovich — if the Arizona statutes are upheld as not violating Section 2 — will provide the “go-ahead” to conservative state legislatures to adopt “ballot integrity” legislation prior to 2022 and 2024 with confidence that the Supreme Court will sustain such legislation so long as the statutes are race-neutral even if they have what some consider a disproportionate impact on minority voters.
The Supreme Court’s role in the judiciary is to chart the course or lower courts to follow — not to step into an electoral maelstrom and attempt to sort out the claims of the competing parties on incomplete and contradictory factual records.
Potentially the two biggest issues that will be directly implicated by the outcome of today’s case will be the degree to which states are going to be allowed to require voter identification and engage in signature matching on absentee ballots without worrying about Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias trying to tie up the election process in court proceedings raising due process and Voting Rights Act claims.
