Supreme Court upholds Trump’s ‘big lie’ ruling on Arizona voting laws

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The leader of a Latino civil rights group has denounced the Supreme Court’s ruling on two laws restricting voting in Arizona, saying they were based on “Donald Trump’s big lie.”

On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the 2016 laws, 6-3, which experts say make it difficult for people of color to challenge voting laws.

Tomas Sainz, President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the ruling shows that the Supreme Court is “unfortunately disconnected from social and historical reality, particularly when it comes to the experiences of minorities who continue to face daily pillaging of basic rights in our country.”

MALDEF led the fight to extend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to include other Mexican and Latin Americans.

In a statement released by the group Thursday, Sainz said Judge Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, accepted the legitimacy of concerns that voter fraud by persons ineligible to vote or voters being intimidated or coerced.

“We should all be disturbed that two-thirds of the justices would accept, without any clear question, legislative intentions that have more basis in Donald Trump’s big lie than any measure of provable social science truth,” he said.

The court, he said, “lives in a world of right-wing rhetoric rather than the real world of lived experience.”

Sainz also noted that the ruling was about laws that came out of Arizona, “an increasingly dense and growing Latino state whose vote in the presidential election was food for reckless congressional contenders who acted despite the unprecedented and dangerous insurrection attempt on January 6.”

The deadly attack and destruction at the Capitol were led in part by white extremist groups and believed to have been encouraged by President Donald Trump. It followed objections by Representative Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, and Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to vote-counting in Arizona, where improved turnout helped Latino Democrats win the presidential race for the first time in about a quarter. century.

A 2016 law at the center of government makes it a crime for anyone other than voters, their families, or their caregivers to mail or hand over their ballot papers. The other allows election officials to throw ballot papers into the wrong district, even if by accident.

“The evidence for massive voter fraud simply doesn’t exist,” Sainz said.

“What we’ve seen is the increased participation of Arizona Latinos in voting, despite decades and decades of attempts to suppress their participation,” he said.

He said his group is calling on leaders, including judicial leaders, to reject even “tacit acquiescence to the false and harmful narrative that questions the legitimacy of a dramatically increased Latino vote in the United States.”

Alito said in his view that although laws may have a different effect on minority voters, this difference does not mean that access to voting is not “equally open” or “does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote.”

“Another obstacle for people to be able to vote”

The law limiting people who can leave or hand in a mail-in ballot, which was in effect in the 2020 election, hit Latinos and other groups that helped drive Latino voter turnout by going door-to-door to talk to people who don’t vote regularly or never vote.

Community groups such as Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA, have attracted many young Latinos to serve as volunteers in the door-to-door voting process, which also includes Latino voter registration.

In Arizona, about 1.2 million eligible voters were Hispanic and made up about a quarter of the state’s eligible voters in 2020.

The groups have been mobilizing Latino voters for about a decade. They were motivated in part by the racist and anti-immigrant policies of Joe Arpaio, the former Mayor of Maricopa County, and by SB 1070, which allowed law enforcement to racially characterize Latinos.

Besides providing potential voter information on political issues, community groups offer tours to the polls, hold mobilization events based on Latino culture and leaders, and help Latinos overcome obstacles that prevent them or them from voting.

“Arizona isn’t a city where there’s a traditional every-home mailbox. Sometimes in neighborhoods you have to walk a mile to be able to deliver outgoing mail,” said Thomas Robles, co-CEO of LUCHA, the progressive group that mobilizes Latino voters, once again. Another obstacle for people to be able to vote.

Once voters are selected, he said, LUCHA workers hand over stamped and signed ballot papers at the mailbox, county election or other office.

“This led to an increased turnout among older Hispanics and other Latinos, and in response to this, Republicans coined a term called ‘ballot harvesting,’ playing on concerns when there was no evidence. They have yet to show any evidence of voter fraud.”

When a law banning groups from providing ballot-delivery services was under discussion in the Arizona legislature, GOP lawmakers were unable to provide evidence of fraud, azcentral.com reported at the time.

But Republican lawmakers said that even if there was no evidence of fraud, people believed that fraud was already occurring and that it undermined confidence in the integrity of the voting system.

Robles said the success of his group’s work and that of others led to the law.

He said, “The reason they passed these laws (2016) is the increase in voter turnout in 2012 and the voter turnout in 2013.”

“These are all just lies by a party that sees itself losing its grip on the state due to changing demographics, because Latinos are building political power and because they (the Republican Party) can no longer control the councils and the legislature at the will of the rich,” he said.

For example, he said, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a law this year that will make it more difficult for people who don’t vote regularly to get a mail-in ballot.

To be on the list to receive such votes, Arizonans must vote by mail in the last two election cycles or they will be removed from the list. They will get notice from election officials and have 90 days to respond before they are removed.

Robles noted that Republicans created the Permanent Early Voting List because so many seniors had trouble standing in line. But now that people of color and youth have used the list, and helped their families vote, “they see it hurting their public vision of the state.”

Arizona has been second only to Texas in the number of polling stations it has closed since a Supreme Court ruling repealing the Voting Rights Act, according to a 2019 report from the Leadership Conference Education Trust. The group found that Arizona closed 302 polling stations after the 2013 Supreme Court ruling.

Arizona has moved to allow people to cast their ballots at any polling station, rather than select districts, but some counties continue to use central allocations.

‘We have to adapt’

Closing constituencies leads to voter confusion and errors. The Ninth United States Court of Appeals found that Arizona shifts voting locations more often in minority communities and that the rates of neglected votes cast in the wrong district were significantly higher in Arizona than in other states, The Washington Post reported.

Maintaining and improving Latino turnout under Thursday’s ruling and recent restrictions on voting would require a much longer participation effort, Robles said. He said mobilization should start even before the next elections and require deeper investments.

“What we have to do now, we have to adapt to the fact that we cannot rely on the Supreme Court to rule in a fair way,” he said. “We have to continue to make sure voters are engaged and prepared about what’s happening in the state and what’s happening in the election.”

He added that Democrats need to pay more attention to Latino voters.

“We have to do better talking to both the men and women whose number one priority in the economy, and I think President Biden didn’t do a good job during the campaign, but there were enough Latinos who just couldn’t stand a speech casting a shadow over Latinos who They were staying away from the party.”

Sainz said the court battles were not over and warned that lawmakers should not view the Supreme Court’s ruling as “providing free leeway for the suppression of minority voters.”

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