Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1257_g204.pdf
Page Number: 71.0

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

27 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

Section 2. 
  The majority’s approach, which would ask only whether 
a discriminatory law “reasonably pursue[s] important state 
interests,”  gives  election  officials  too  easy  an  escape  from 
Section 2.  Ante, at 25 (emphasis added).  Of course prevent-
ing voter intimidation is an important state interest.  And 
of course preventing election fraud is the same.  But those 
interests  are  also  easy to  assert  groundlessly or pretextu-
ally  in  voting  discrimination  cases.    Congress  knew  that 
when it passed Section 2.  Election officials can all too often, 
the Senate Report noted, “offer a non-racial rationalization” 
for  even  laws  that  “purposely  discriminate[ ].”    S.  Rep., 
at 37;  see  supra,  at  14,  17–18,  and  n.  5.    A  necessity  test 
filters out those offerings.  See, e.g., Albemarle, 422 U. S., 
at 425.  It thereby prevents election officials from flouting, 
circumventing, or discounting Section 2’s command not to 
discriminate. 
  In  that  regard,  the  past  offers  a  lesson  to  the  present.  
Throughout  American  history,  election  officials  have  as-
serted anti-fraud interests in using voter suppression laws.  
Poll taxes, the classic mechanism to keep black people from 
voting, were often justified as “preserv[ing] the purity of the 
ballot box [and] facilitat[ing] honest elections.”  J. Kousser, 
The Shaping of Southern Politics 111, n. 9 (1974).  A raft of 
election regulations—including “elaborate registration pro-
cedures” and “early poll closings”—similarly excluded white 
immigrants (Irish, Italians, and so on) from the polls on the 
ground  of  “prevent[ing]  fraud  and  corruption.”    Keyssar 
159;  see  ibid.  (noting  that  in  those  times  “claims  of  wide-
spread corruption” were backed “almost entirely” by “anec-
dotes  [with]  little  systematic  investigation  or  evidence”).  
Take even the majority’s example of a policy advancing an 
“important  state  interest”:  “the  use  of  private  voting 
booths,” in which voters marked their own ballots.  Ante, at 
19.    In  the  majority’s  high-minded  account,  that  innova-
tion—then known as the Australian voting system, for the