Supreme Court Shoots Down Early Voting in Ohio

The Supreme Court delayed the start of early voting in Ohio Monday, a day before it was scheduled to begin, temporarily blocking a victory won by voting rights groups in lower courts.

The decision has potential implications for other states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas and Arkansas, where state efforts to tighten up voting procedures are opposed by civil rights groups who say they disproportionately affect minorities.

Ohio's was the first of those cases to reach the high court, and the conservative majority blocked lower court rulings that would have jump-started early voting Tuesday.

Their action, opposed by the court's four liberal justices, reversed a federal appeals court decision that had blocked the state from reducing early voting from 35 to 28 days. The lower court also had ordered the state to restore some evening and Sunday voting that the Legislature had eliminated.

Comments

[silverfang789]

Republicans don't want minorities, young people and the poor to be able to vote. It behooves all these people to show up at their polling place with whatever required documents on hand and vote these right wing nutjobs out of office once and for all.

[Anon E. Mouse]

Yes, because those evil republicans know that democrats, especially the young, minority, and poor democrats, can't perform a simple task like getting a fucking ID, or showing up to the polls on the same days as republicans. Poor dems; how can they possibly be expected to overcome such insurmountable intellectual obstacles, especially those minorities? Everybody knows that getting a free ID and getting a free ride to the polls is so much harder for them.

[Scarecrow Repair]

Uh huh. Did you even RTFA? The Ohio law changed early voting to 4 weeks from 5 weeks. That's all that has changed here; the Ohio courts thought that one week reduction shocking to the conscience, and the Supreme Court said WTF?

Meanwhile your beloved New York and most other states have no early voting at all.

[Faceless Commenter]

Show up at their polling place? Can these simple-minded, oppressed folk even FIND their polling places? Oh dear, "documents" -- maybe there's something tucked into the family Bible. These disenfranchised, forgotten shirtless ones don't have driver's licenses or other state-provided IDs, you know. No one will tell them which bus you have to take to get to the whatever-agency to get one.

Another high-handed elitist dismissing the limitations of the downtrodden, so sad...

[AlgerHiss]

The 2002 US Senate race in Minnesota: That one example alone should dispel any notion of "early voting" being a good idea.

[Free Society]

go on... I don't want to google

[Brian D]

Requiring some kind of valid photo ID to vote is an unconstitutional and racist roadblock to people exercising a sacred right. By contrast, valid photo ID, waiting periods, criminal background checks, and mental health history checks before being allowed within a mile of an unloaded firearm you might want to purchase are just common sense regulations.

[Free Society]

where state efforts to tighten up voting procedures are opposed by civil rights groups who say they disproportionately affect minorities.

So then the same argument could be used to say that early voting disproportionately benefits minorities, no?