Source: https://www.justice.org/what-we-do/enhance-practice-law/publications/trial-magazine/cast-counted-supreme-court-review
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 03:47:02+00:00

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Three decisions from last Term allow states to engage in actions that diminish voting rights and access to the polls—and may signal the long-term direction of the Court.
The conservative position prevailed in almost every U.S. Supreme Court decision in the October 2017 Term, and voting rights cases were no exception. Opinions in three major voting cases concerned partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering and discrimination, and purging voter rolls. These decisions reflect a Court that defers greatly to states’ choices with regard to voting, including when those choices have discriminatory effects against minority voters. This will matter in voting rights litigation and in the outcome of elections.
The Supreme Court granted review on the questions of whether federal courts may hear challenges to partisan gerrymandering and, if so, when gerrymandering violates the U.S. Constitution. However, the Court did not decide those issues, focusing instead on whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor that condemned partisan gerrymandering as “incompatible with democratic principles.”10 Because gerrymandering benefits those who control the political branches of government, she explained, only the courts can remedy the problem.
Justice Kagan agreed that to prevail on remand, a plaintiff must allege that he or she resides in a district that has been cracked or packed.11 But she also noted that partisan gerrymandering infringes on First Amendment rights of association held by political parties, other political organizations, and their members.12 This injury is distinct from vote dilution, and the standing inquiry would be different because the alleged injury is based on statewide partisan gerrymandering and would not require that the plaintiff live in a cracked or packed district. By encouraging the plaintiffs to focus on this association theory, Kagan may have been offering the plaintiffs a roadmap for how to present a partisan gerrymandering challenge that will have the best chance of succeeding in the Court.
As to the Voting Rights Act violation, the Court used the test from Thornburg v. Gingles that a plaintiff must establish “a geo­graphically compact minority population sufficient to constitute a majority in a ­single-member district, political cohesion among the members of the minority group, and bloc voting by the majority [group] to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.”21 Then, a plaintiff must prove through a totality of the circumstances that the district lines dilute the votes of the minority group’s members.22 The Court found that the plaintiffs failed to meet these requirements, but that one district involved impermissible racial gerrymandering because it was drawn with the predominant motive of creating a majority-Latino district.
The Court concluded, 5-4 again, that Ohio’s process does not violate the failure-to-vote clause or any other part of the NVRA.31 Ohio’s removal process follows the law to the letter: It does not remove a registrant on ­change-of-residence grounds unless the registrant is sent and fails to mail back a return card and then fails to vote for an additional four years.
Violating the NVRA requires “sole causation”—that the only reason a person is removed is failure to vote, which was not the case here because voters were removed both for failure to vote and for failure to return the card. The plaintiffs argued that a voter’s failure to return a card was not an adequate measure of whether that person has moved because many people receive the cards but discard them or forget to return them. The Court disagreed, explaining that it is irrelevant whether people actually return the cards; Congress thought this was a meaningful way of ascertaining continuing residence, and this method was consistent with the NVRA.
These three cases together give states much more latitude regarding voting rights, and with Justice Kennedy’s replacement likely to be a more conservative justice, similar results in voting cases are probable for a long time to come. This will make it much harder for civil rights plaintiffs in voting cases and will affect voting access in future elections.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He can be reached at echemerinsky@law.berkeley.edu.
Id. at 1924. “In 2012, Republicans won 60 [out of 99 Wisconsin] Assembly seats with 48.6 percent of the two-party statewide vote for Assembly candidates. In 2014, Republicans won 63 Assembly seats with 52 percent of the statewide vote.” Id. at 1923.
Whitford v. Gill, 218 F. Supp. 3d 837 (W.D. Wis. 2016).
Gill, 138 S. Ct. at 1929–31.
Id. at 1923, 1931. The Court pointed to its prior decisions that held that plaintiffs who allege a violation of their rights from racial gerrymandering have standing only when their own district has been gerrymandered. Id. at 1930.
Id. at 1934–35. (Kagan, J., with Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, JJ., concurring).
138 S. Ct. 1942 (2018).
Perez v. Abbott, 274 F. Supp. 3d 624 (W.D. Tex. 2017).
Abbott, 138 S. Ct. at 2324.
Id. at 2314. It also noted that a tension exists between the two: The Constitution says that race cannot be a predominant factor in districting unless the government meets strict scrutiny. But if the government draws election districts in a way that disadvantages minorities, it violates §2 of the Voting Rights Act, which means the government often must consider the racial effects of its districting. Id. at 2314–15.
478 U.S. 30 (1986); id. at 2330–31.
Id. at 2336. (Sotomayor, J., with Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, JJ. dissenting).
Id. at 1841; see also Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3503.21(B)(2).
2 U.S.C. §20507(d) (West 2018); 52 U.S.C. §20507(b)(2) (West 2018). The NVRA was amended by the Help America Vote Act in 2002 and specifies that “nothing in [this prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using the procedures” of sending a return card and removing registrants who fail to return the card and fail to vote during the requisite time. Husted, 138 S. Ct. 1857.
Husted, 138 S. Ct. at 1846.
Id. at 1865. (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

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