I have written this piece in Slate (gift link). It begins:
The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Monday’s Watson v. RNC case was a small victory for voters in recognizing that states have the right to accept ballots that are cast by voters, including military voters, by Election Day but that arrive in election offices a few days later. But that same states-rights principle may come back to bite voters in a far more significant case out of Arizona that the court agreed on Monday to hear next term. At issue in Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota is whether Arizona can reject voter registration applications from eligible people who fail to provide proof of citizenship like a birth certificate or naturalization papers. A decision in favor of Arizona’s mini SAVE Act could disenfranchise literally millions of voters for the 2028 elections.…
The Supreme Court oral argument in Watsonrevealed that some of the more MAGA-friendly justices, including Justice Samuel Alito, were buying into a fever dream of voter fraud that could somehow justify limiting mail-in balloting opportunities. And in his dissenting opinion in Watson, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh (in part), Alito pumped up fears of ballot harvesters, fraud, and loss of voter confidence to justify his stingy reading of the election statute. The argument connecting the deadline to fraud was an embarrassment, and Barrett easily swatted it down: “Plaintiffs and the dissent argue that if we uphold Mississippi’s law, States could put party bosses, ballot harvesters, or Uber drivers in charge of collecting ballots. … Yet this would also be permissible under their interpretation, so long as the ballots are delivered by election day.”
Watson is a small victory for voters—small because not many voters cast these late-arriving ballots and voters eventually would adjust to earlier ballot deadlines. The greatest significance of Watson is that a court majority (barely) rejected a bonkers reading of a federal statute on the basis of voter-fraud fantasies; had the court agreed with the RNC, it would have signaled that the court would avoid text, history, and precedent to further constrict voting. The scary part is that four justices were willing to do just that…
It seems more likely than not that a majority of justices will side with Arizona when the court hears the case next year. Unlike Watson, where the RNC’s arguments bordered on frivolous, here there are more difficult questions about interpreting federal law that the court could resolve, as it did in Watson, in favor of the states’ rights to set voting rules.
So people can rightly celebrate voters’ minor victory in Watson. But don’t mistake the Watsonruling for some indication that the court stands ready to read federal and state election laws to protect voters. Next time around, a state victory would mean a voter loss.