This morning, the Supreme Court, in what for this term was an unusual “ideological” split of the six “conservatives” versus the three “liberals,” upheld two Arizona election regulations: its out-of-precinct policy, which doesn’t count provisional ballots cast in person outside a voter’s designated precinct, and its ballot-collection law, which allows only certain people (essentially family, postmen and election officials) to handle someone else’s completed early ballot. The question was whether these rules complied with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which proscribes racial disenfranchisement.

The case is Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, in which Cato filed an amicus brief not to take a position on the particular policies, but urging the Court to give much-needed guidance on Section 2 vote-denial claims. (Here’s an essay that Stacy Hanson and I wrote to summarize our arguments.)

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority and explained that the “core” of Section 2 is “the requirement that voting be ‘equally open.’ ” The provision also requires “consideration of ‘the totality of the circumstances,’ ” of which some of the important factors are: (1) how much of a burden a voting rule imposes, acknowledging that “[m]ere inconvenience cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation”; (2) the extent to which a voting rule departs from what standard practice was in 1982, when Section 2 was last amended (and when we didn’t have in-person early voting, no-excuse absentee voting was rare, etc.); (3) the size of disparities in a rule’s effect on members of different racial or ethnic groups, accepting that the “mere fact there is some disparity in impact does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open”; (4) the opportunities to vote that a state provides as a whole, so “where a State provides multiple ways to vote, any burden … cannot be evaluated without also taking into account the other available means”; and (5) the strength of the state’s interest, including in making it easy to vote but hard to cheat.

That seems like a pretty obvious framework for evaluating these sorts of cases, but it’s actually the first time the Court has set out anything like it outside the context of vote-dilution litigation surrounding redistricting. Still, this was a straightforward case that should’ve garnered no dissents: restrictions on ballot-harvesting and requirements to vote in one’s precinct are commonplace rules and certainly among the “usual burdens of voting,” as our legal understandings have long reflected.

Of course, in our polarized times, that’s not to be, so we have hyperbolic claims about how the Court is subverting democracy. But if you read Brnovich carefully, you see that what the majority is saying is that you have to show race-based vote denial to sustain a claim for race-based vote denial. That reinforces the Voting Rights Act while respecting our democratic structures — and it also throws cold water on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Georgia’s recent electoral reforms, which is a political exercise attacking mythical voter suppression.

For more background and to read Cato’s brief, see here.