The Supreme Court Is Poised to Further Undermine Access to the Polls

With almost every passing day, it feels like the Trump administration further erodes our democracy. The retribution we’ve seen in McCarthy-like witch hunts and censorship in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the military personnel policing our own cities, and the tragic disappearing of our neighbors are only the latest examples of our descent into authoritarianism.   

Adding to the danger, our Supreme Court is continuing its anti-democratic work even in cases not directly involving the Trump administration. The court will begin its next term Monday, and the docket is already full of cases that will give the conservative majority opportunities to further diminish the power of the people. 

Long before Trump came on the scene, the Roberts Court had been eagerly dismantling the Voting Rights Act (VRA), greenlighting gerrymandering, controlling access to the polls, and allowing the richest to dominate our politics through increasingly unlimited spending. In the upcoming term, the court has taken up cases that will allow it to continue dismantling our democracy and eroding our basic civil rights.

Our Supreme Court is continuing its anti-democratic work even in cases not directly involving the Trump administration.

Two redistricting cases, Louisiana v. Callais and Robinson v. Callais, could have the biggest impact. Both are being used by conservatives to attack Section 2 of the VRA — the only section left that the Court hasn’t gutted. 

It was only two years ago that the court upheld this section, ruling that Alabama had violated Section 2 by creating maps that were disproportionately majority-white despite the VRA’s requirement that states create districts representative of voters of color. In the present cases, Louisiana has created proportional districts, but conservatives are challenging the map as unconstitutional because the state considered race when drawing the districts. And both the U.S. Justice Department and Louisiana itself — the latter in a striking about-face — are supporting that stance.

This is a new tactic in the voting realm. We’re used to states openly defying precedents in hopes of convincing the court to overturn them (like with abortion). But here, they’re trying to backdoor-challenge the law by following it as they’re supposed to and then objecting to its requirements. They claim that ensuring the voting power of people of color is not diluted is itself racist. It’s the same absurd logic that was used to challenge affirmative action, claiming that the very practices put in place to prevent racial discrimination are somehow racist in and of themselves. It’s an approach we’ve seen repeatedly implemented only to diminish the opportunities and engagement of people of color, and it could be exactly the setup the court needs to destroy the VRA once and for all.

The Louisiana cases aren’t the only ones that could threaten equal access to the polls. Another case brought by Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) aims to crack down on mail-in ballots by preventing them from being counted simply for arriving late, even if they were postmarked before Election Day. 

Knowing the radical way the Roberts Court has been operating, it might even rule directly on mail-in voting itself.

In taking the case, SCOTUS said it would only consider the issue of standing — do candidates have standing to challenge election laws that could hurt them? The lower courts had tossed the case on the grounds that Bost was not impacted by mail-in voting and thus had no standing, so it’s disturbing that the court wants to reconsider that conclusion. Even that narrow issue could let the justices offer a disturbing invitation to anyone hoping to challenge established state mail-in ballot laws in hopes of changing the results. We already saw that attempted in the North Carolina Supreme Court race this past year, and it created unnecessary chaos for our election system. 

And knowing the radical way the Roberts Court has been operating, it might even rule directly on mail-in voting itself, which could disenfranchise voters in the 18 states and Washington, D.C that allow late-arriving ballots. More likely, if the court wants to tackle that issue, it will use a different case — a challenge to Mississippi’s law allowing late-arriving ballots, which later this month the justices will consider whether to hear.

People with time and money are willing to do whatever they can to control our election systems, and that’s exactly what’s at stake in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. The court’s 2010 Citizens United case decided that corporations are people when it comes to political spending, and we’ve seen that spending explode ever since. The court could use this new case, which includes Vice President Vance as a challenger, to make it even worse.

As it stands, there are limits on how much a political party can coordinate with a political candidate on campaign ads — limits the court upheld as constitutional in its 2001 FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee ruling. This prevents a donor from pouring a ton of money into a party to get around the limits on what can be given to individual candidates. But this case challenges that barrier on coordination. If overturned, it would be as if individual limits didn’t even exist, because so much more money could just be poured into parties instead, only to be spent at the direction of the candidate or their campaign. It would invite even more money into politics from the wealthiest Americans and effectively silence the rest of us. 

These are just the cases that have blatant implications on our democracy. There are also a pair of cases once again threatening LGBTQ+ equality (focused on transgender sports bans and the abusive practice of conversion therapy), immigrants (potentially giving the government even more arbitrary power to deny asylum claims), and environmental protections (an attempt by Chevron USA to avoid millions of dollars in pollution accountability). 

Plus, the docket is light so far, and there are likely many more troubling cases percolating that could be added this year. To stay updated on the major cases coming up this year, make sure to check out Alliance for Justice’s Supreme Court Preview.

We also can’t forget that the court’s shadow docket continues to empower the Trump administration and invent new precedents without argument or explanation. While there might be some comfort in imagining the court is still functioning within its limits, its trajectory is as dangerous as ever, and we can’t give it the benefit of the doubt as democratic norms crumble around us.