Kavanaugh's Record Doesn't Bode Well for Voting Rights
He voted to uphold a law that threatened to disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority voters.
Source: Mother Jones
Donald Trumps new Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, could determine how the court rules on cases that shape the future of voting rights in the United States. And if his track record is any indication, many Americans could be disenfranchised as a result.
As a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, Kavanaugh voted in 2012 to uphold a South Carolina voter ID law that the Obama administration said would disenfranchise tens of thousands of minority citizens. The Justice Department blocked the law, which required government-issued photo identification to vote, in late 2011 for violating the Voting Rights Act.
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But when South Carolina then sought approval for its law from a three-judge court panel in Washington, DC, Kavanaugh wrote the opinion upholding it. He found that the controversial law does not have a discriminatory retrogressive effect and was not enacted for a discriminatory purpose. He pointed to a Supreme Court decision upholding Indianas voter ID law in 2008. The Supreme Courts affirmation of the general legitimacy of the purpose behind a voter ID law is consistent with the fact that many Statesparticularly in the wake of the voting system problems exposed during the 2000 electionshave enacted stronger voter ID laws, among various other recent changes to voting laws.
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South Carolina didnt present any cases of voter fraud to justify its law, but Kavanaugh wrote that such laws were constitutional despite an absence of evidence of fraud. We conclude that South Carolinas goals of preventing voter fraud and increasing electoral confidence are legitimate; those interests cannot be deemed pretextual merely because of an absence of recorded incidents of in-person voter fraud in South Carolina, he wrote.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/kavanaughs-record-doesnt-bode-well-for-voting-rights/
Kavanaugh was also a member of the legal team in Bush v. Gore.
sfwriter
(3,032 posts)Last edited Tue Jul 10, 2018, 02:03 PM - Edit history (2)
Seriously, there should be a site that collects votes of those disenfranchised und publishes an official tally.
Snellius
(6,881 posts)They've quietly become the Repub's stealth weapon, a backroom Trojan horse, that doesn't get the kind of cautionary investigation that it deserves.
sfwriter
(3,032 posts)Prove they are not on the rolls. Thats a problem.