The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld election-integrity measures in Arizona—a decision that likely undermines the Biden Justice Department’s recent efforts to harass reform-minded red states and will make it harder for power-grabbing Democrats to wage activist court challenges to the laws being enacted by other GOP legislatures.
The case, Brnovich vs. DNC, determined that Arizona’s restrictions on ballot-harvesting, put in place following the 2016 election, did not violate the Voting Rights Act.
“There is no more sacred duty for a public servant than preserving both the people’s right to vote and their confidence in the election process,” said Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, the plaintiff in the appeal, in a statement released prior to the decision.
“Arizona’s ballot box safeguards are shared by many states, were recommended by a bipartisan commission, and are constitutional because they equally protect us all,” Brnovich said.
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Headline USA reached out to Brnovich’s publicist for further comment after the ruling to address its possible implications, and will update with any response.
The 9th circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco had held that the measures disproportionately affected black, Hispanic and Native American voters.
In a majority decision penned by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the court voted 6-3 to reverse that decision, determining that Arizona’s limits on who can return early ballots for another person and refusal to count ballots cast in the wrong precinct were not racially discriminatory.
“Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it,” Alito wrote.
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“Election fraud has had serious consequences in other States,” he continued, pointing to a high-profile case from North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, in which prominent Democrat lawyers actually argued the opposite position about ballot-harvesting to reverse a Republican victory.
“The Arizona Legislature was not obligated to wait for something similar to happen closer to home,” Alito wrote.
During the most recent election, left-wing groups, including a labor union from Los Angeles, blanketed vulnerable parts of the state with volunteers, who sometimes engaged in aggressive, confrontational and intimidating canvassing efforts, as well as helping to “cure” ballots from voters in places like Maricopa County who said it was too hot to go to the polls.
But the inability for third-party activists to collect ballots, as is permitted in neighboring California and other blue states, hindered their efforts to flip Arizona, once a solid-red bastion of conservatism.
Arizona’s GOP-led legislature subsequently sought an intensive audit of Maricopa’s 2.1 million ballots, which turned up a number of apparent irregularities, potentially casting its certification for Democrat Joe Biden into question.
In a court session that has been remarkable for its number of bipartisan decisions, two of the Supreme Court’s final—and most closely watched—cases on the summer docket, including Brnovich, broke along ideological lines, likely adding fuel to the radical Left’s push for court-packing.
It also throws a wrench in several legislative and legal efforts that congressional Democrats and the Biden administration had deployed in hopes of securing permanent majorities.
That includes the controversial HR1 voting-overhaul, which already appeared doomed after it died last week in the Senate.
Among the many ways Democrats sought to nationalize voting under their direct oversight in the blatant power-grab was a measure to mandate ballot-harvesting in every state.
The ruling also casts doubt on recent lawsuits threatened by the the Biden Justice Department.
As it has done in trying to extort Arizona lawmakers over their audit, the DOJ, now run by failed Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, had announced last week that it planned to target Georgia‘s legislature over its effort to close loopholes in the wake of the disastrous 2020 election.
