Republican-Backed Voting Curbs Set for US Supreme Court Scrutiny

Fresh off an election in which former President 👤Donald Trump made false claims of fraud, the U.S. ⚖️Supreme Court is poised to ponder the legality of a restriction on early voting in Arizona that his fellow Republicans argued was needed to combat fraud.

The Republican-backed law, spurred in part by a video purportedly showing voter fraud that courts later deemed misleading, made it a crime to provide another person’s completed early ballot to election officials, with the exception of family members or caregivers.

Community activists sometimes engage in ballot collection to facilitate voting and increase voter turnout. Ballot collection is legal in most states, with varying limitations. Republican critics call the practice “ballot harvesting.”

⚖️Supreme Court arguments over the 2016 ban and another Arizona voting restriction – both ruled unlawful by a lower court – are scheduled for next Tuesday, with a decision due by the end of June. A broad ruling by high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, endorsing the restrictions could further weaken the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal law that barred racial discrimination in voting, by making it harder to prove violations.

The video, taken from security camera footage, shows a man carrying a box of ballots into a Maricopa County Elections Department office. It was posted on a blog in 2014 by A.J. LaFaro, the Republican Party chairman at the time in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix.

LaFaro’s post questioned whether the man was a U.S. citizen and called him a “violent thug” who was “stuffing the ballot box as I watched in amazement.” A judge later called the blog post “racially charged” and concluded that the footage showed no illegal activity. The man seen in the video filed an unsuccessful defamation suit against LaFaro.