The Supreme Court Just Dealt a Blow to Voting Rights Advocates

One of Ohio’s major restrictions will remain in place.

Voters line up outside the Hamilton County Board of Elections for early voting in Cincinnati in 2008. Al Behrman/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Ohio’s Golden Week—a period when voters can register and cast ballots early at the same time—will not be in place for the November election. The US Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an appeals court panel decision and stonewalled a last-ditch effort by Ohio Democrats to restore the extra week during the state’s early voting period. 

The saga began in February 2014, after the state’s Republican-led Legislature passed a series of voting restrictions that included eliminating Golden Week and same-day voter registration. The Ohio branch of the NAACP filed a lawsuit in May 2014, alleging the changes disproportionately affected minority voters. That September, a federal district judge granted an injunction halting the state’s early voting restrictions. The state appealed, and a panel on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s decision. But later that month, the Supreme Court put the order on hold, which kept the state’s initial restrictions in place for the midterm election.

“The undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually.”

After the election, the state’s NAACP reached a settlement with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted that resulted in additional evening hours and another Sunday added to the early voting period, but the settlement may not have gone far enough. The Ohio Democratic Party, along with two other county Democratic organizations, later joined a lawsuit on behalf of several individuals to challenge the measures, arguing that they were discriminatory and disproportionately affected minority voters. (The Ohio Organizing Collaborative filed the initial suit in May 2015, but later withdrew.)

They claimed the rollbacks violated the 14th Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures on the basis of race, color, or language. In May, a federal district judge ruled that the reductions disproportionately burdened African American voters and resulted “in less opportunity for African Americans to participate in the political process than other voters.” But a federal appeals court panel disagreed and reversed the lower court’s ruling in August. “This case presents yet another appeal…asking the federal courts to become entangled, as overseers and micromanagers, in the minutiae of state election processes,” wrote Judge David McKeague in the majority opinion. “The undisputed factual record shows that it’s easy to vote in Ohio. Very easy, actually,” he added later. The Supreme Court today agreed.

Some experts, such as University of California-Irvine professor and election law expert Rick Hasen, still consider the state’s 29-day early voting period “exceedingly generous.” In a blog post after the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision, he wrote, “[W]hile I might support Golden Week as good policy, I worry when courts are used in this way to prevent every cutback in voting, especially after voting rights proponents had settled a suit with Ohio on favorable terms.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate