> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theamericanquorum.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions 6-3 and Sets New Guideposts for Voting Rights Act Challenges - URL: https://www.theamericanquorum.com/taq-historical-2021-07-03-us/ - Published: 2021-07-04T03:59:00.000Z - Updated: 2021-07-04T03:59:00.000Z - Description: The Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting rules in a 6-3 decision and articulated new guideposts for judging Section 2 Voting Rights Act challenges to the time, place and manner of voting. - Author: TAQ Staff - Tags: US, #Import 2026-08-31 00:54 The Supreme Court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions Thursday in a 6-3 decision that gives states greater room to regulate how ballots are cast and collected and establishes a new set of guideposts for lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the six-justice majority in [Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1257%5Fnew%5F4g15.pdf?ref=theamericanquorum.com), concluded that Arizona’s policy of discarding ballots cast in the wrong precinct and its limits on who may collect another voter’s early ballot do not violate Section 2\. The Court also rejected the claim that the ballot-collection law was enacted with racially discriminatory intent. The ruling is the Court’s first full application of Section 2 to rules governing the “time, place, or manner” of voting rather than to district maps or vote dilution. That makes the framework Alito set out potentially more consequential than the fate of the two Arizona provisions themselves, particularly as states across the country revise election procedures after the extraordinary expansion of mail and early voting during the pandemic. ## Two Arizona rules survive review The first challenged policy applies in Arizona counties that use precinct-based Election Day voting. A voter who appears at the wrong precinct may cast a provisional ballot, but the ballot is not counted if election officials later determine it was cast outside the voter’s assigned precinct. The second provision, enacted in House Bill 2023, generally prohibits third parties from collecting completed early ballots, with exceptions for family members, household members, caregivers, postal workers and election officials. The Democratic National Committee and other challengers argued that both rules disproportionately burdened Native American, Hispanic and Black voters and therefore violated Section 2’s guarantee of equal opportunity to participate in the political process. The litigation record had been developed for years, and the Ninth Circuit ultimately ruled for the challengers before the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. A contemporaneous [case summary](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/cert/19-1257?ref=theamericanquorum.com) from Cornell’s Legal Information Institute outlined the competing arguments over disparate impact, fraud prevention and the scope of Section 2 before oral argument. At the March 2 [oral argument](https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral%5Farguments/audio/2020/19-1257?ref=theamericanquorum.com), the justices pressed both sides on how courts should distinguish ordinary election rules from practices that deny minority voters equal opportunity. The questioning foreshadowed the difficulty of fashioning a rule that would account for racial disparities without converting every small difference in voting patterns into a federal violation. ## The majority offers five guideposts Alito declined to announce a single test. Instead, the majority identified several considerations that courts should weigh in future Section 2 challenges. They include the size of the burden imposed by a voting rule, the degree to which the rule departs from practices common when Congress amended Section 2 in 1982, the size of any racial disparity, the opportunities provided by the state’s voting system as a whole and the strength of the state’s interests in the challenged rule. The opinion emphasized that “mere inconvenience” cannot be enough to establish a violation and that some differences in voting rates among racial groups are inevitable. It also said courts should assess the entire system rather than examine a single rule in isolation. Arizona, the majority noted, offers early in-person voting and no-excuse voting by mail for nearly a month before Election Day. That approach reversed the en banc Ninth Circuit, whose earlier [decision](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/18-15845/18-15845-2020-01-27.html?ref=theamericanquorum.com) had found the out-of-precinct policy and ballot-collection restriction violated Section 2 and concluded that the collection ban was enacted with discriminatory intent. The Supreme Court said the lower court placed too much weight on disparate outcomes and too little on the modest burdens and state interests involved. ## Kagan warns Section 2 is being narrowed Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, issued a lengthy dissent arguing that the majority had rewritten a broad statute into a much narrower protection. She said Section 2 was designed to prohibit electoral practices that leave minority voters with less opportunity than other citizens, and she accused the majority of creating extra-textual limits because it feared the statute would invalidate too many state laws. The disagreement was unusually direct because both sides accepted that Section 2 remains an important tool after the Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision disabled the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula. Kagan argued that the majority’s new framework weakens the remaining nationwide protection at precisely the moment states are adopting new voting restrictions. Contemporaneous [analysis](https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/07/court-upholds-arizona-voting-restrictions-limits-cases-under-voting-rights-act/?ref=theamericanquorum.com) from SCOTUSblog described the ruling as making it more difficult to challenge election regulations under Section 2 because plaintiffs will have to overcome the majority’s emphasis on overall voting access, historical practice and the size of the burden. ## Justice Department says enforcement will continue The Justice Department responded within hours. In an official July 1 [statement](https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/department-justice-statement-supreme-court-decision-brnovich?ref=theamericanquorum.com), the department said it remained committed to challenging discriminatory election laws and urged Congress to enact additional protections for voting rights. The department also posted the [decision](https://www.justice.gov/crt/case-document/brnovich-v-dnc-supreme-court-decision?ref=theamericanquorum.com) through its Civil Rights Division, underscoring the ruling’s immediate importance to federal voting-rights enforcement. Attorney General Merrick Garland had already announced plans for stronger scrutiny of state election laws, and Brnovich now defines part of the legal terrain on which those challenges will proceed. The decision does not eliminate Section 2 claims against voting procedures. Nor does it say states may adopt intentionally discriminatory rules. But it gives courts a framework that treats small burdens and modest statistical differences as less likely to violate federal law, especially where voters have multiple alternative ways to cast ballots and states can identify traditional interests such as orderly administration or fraud prevention. That makes Thursday’s ruling a national election-law decision, not merely an Arizona case. States considering changes to absentee voting, ballot collection, precinct rules and identification requirements now have their clearest Supreme Court guidance in decades about how Section 2 applies outside the redistricting context. Voting-rights groups, state officials and federal lawyers will be testing the boundaries of those guideposts almost immediately.