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      Ohio Supreme Court Intensifies a Redistricting Map Standoff

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      Years ago, voters created a commission to make political maps fairer. Now the State Supreme Court is blocking maps drawn by the Republican-led commission, saying nothing has changed.A bipartisan majority of Ohio Supreme Court justices has ratcheted up an extraordinary legal standoff over the state’s political boundaries, rejecting — for the third time in barely two months — new maps of state legislative districts that heavily favor the Republican Party.The decision appears likely to force the state to postpone its primary elections, scheduled to take place on May 3, until new maps of both state legislative seats and districts for the United States House of Representatives pass constitutional muster.The court’s ruling late Wednesday was a blunt rebuff of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a Republican-dominated body that voters established in 2015 explicitly to make political maps fairer, but that now stands accused of trying to fatten already lopsided G.O.P. majorities in the state’s legislature and the U.S. House.Ohio has become the heart of a nationwide battle over political boundaries that has assumed life-or-death proportions for both Republicans and Democrats, one in which courts like Ohio’s have played an increasingly crucial role.With redistricting complete in all but five states, Democrats have erased much of a huge partisan advantage that Republicans had amassed on the House of Representatives map by dominating the last round of redistricting in 2011. Democrats have also rolled back some of the Republican gerrymanders that have allowed the party to dominate state legislatures.The minority justices in the 4-to-3 ruling in Ohio, all Republicans, said in a bitter dissent that the decision “decrees electoral chaos” by upending election plans and fomenting a constitutional crisis. But the four majority justices, led by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, said it was the Redistricting Commission that was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the State Constitution’s mandate for political fairness.Constitutional scholars and Ohio political experts have said the Redistricting Commission had been betting that the high court would be forced to approve its maps so that it would not shoulder blame for disrupting statewide elections. The court has already complained of foot-dragging by the commission, threatening last month to hold its members in contempt for failing to produce a new state legislative map on time.“There’s this attitude that ‘if we can’t get our way with the court, we’re going to try to run out the clock on them,’” Paul De Marco, a Cincinnati lawyer who specializes in appeals cases, said of the Redistricting Commission, which is made up of five Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, and two Democrats.With the ruling this week, the court effectively called the commission’s bluff.“This court is not a rubber stamp,” Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, wrote in a concurring opinion. “By interpreting and enforcing the requirements of the Ohio Constitution, we do not create chaos or a constitutional crisis — we work to promote the trust of Ohio’s voters in the redistricting of Ohio’s legislative districts.”The stalemate is playing out in a state whose 15 House seats — the seventh-largest congressional delegation in the nation — represent the second-largest trove of congressional districts whose boundaries remain to be drawn for this year’s midterm elections. (Florida, with 28 House seats, is the largest.) The delegation’s partisan makeup could determine control of an almost evenly divided House of Representatives.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.The Ohio Supreme Court is also in a standoff with the Redistricting Commission over the state’s congressional map, having already rejected one version in January as too partisan. It is considering a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the commission’s newly redrawn map of Ohio congressional districts, which would create solidly Republican seats in 10 of the 15 districts. The map would leave Democrats with three safe seats and two competitive seats where the party would hold slight edges.The fight over the maps could well move to federal court, where Republicans have asked that a three-judge panel be created to consider instituting the Redistricting Commission’s rejected maps so that elections can proceed. Chief Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio declined to act on Monday, noting that the State Supreme Court was considering the maps.But Judge Marbley, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, indicated that he would step in if there were “serious doubts that state processes will produce a state map in time for the primary election.”In North Carolina, Pennsylvania and some other states, state supreme courts have played decisive roles in redistricting this year, casting aside gerrymanders in favor of fairer maps often drawn by nonpartisan experts. The Ohio court is at an impasse because the State Constitution allows the court to reject maps it deems unconstitutional, but gives it no clear authority to make maps more fair, much less to adopt ones that the commission did not draw. Maureen O’Connor, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and a Republican, said the state’s G.O.P.-dominated Redistricting Commission was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the Ohio Constitution’s mandate for political fairness. Earl Gibson III/Getty ImagesIt wasn’t supposed to be this way.Ohioans thought they had abolished hyperpartisan political maps for good seven years ago, when they resoundingly approved a constitutional amendment that took mapmaking authority away from politicians in the legislature and gave it to the new commission. That referendum ended a long struggle between voting rights advocates and political leaders of both parties, who had resisted any change in the mapmaking process.The two sides struck a compromise that gave politicians control of the Redistricting Commission, filling its seven seats with elected officials and their appointees, generally favoring the party in power. In return, voting rights groups were granted one of their wishes: a constitutional mandate that the commission draw maps that “correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio,” based on the previous decade’s elections.Seven in 10 voters approved the 2015 amendment. Three years later, another amendment effectively extended the deal to congressional maps.“This issue is proof that when you work together in a bipartisan manner, you can accomplish great things,” Matt Huffman, a Republican state representative from Lima who campaigned for the 2015 amendment, said after it passed.Today Mr. Huffman is the president of the State Senate and sits on the Redistricting Commission. But he now says that the constitutional requirement that maps reflect voters’ preferences was only “aspirational” — a view the Supreme Court rejected in January.Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that “we mobilized more than 12,000 Ohioans to advocate for fair maps through emails, phone calls and even submitting their own maps.”She added: “What’s disappointing, and shocking for most of us, is that it’s business as usual. Nothing has changed.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Supreme Court Allows Court-Imposed Voting Maps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania

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      State courts had ruled that earlier maps for congressional elections had been warped by partisan gerrymandering. Democrats stand to benefit from the justices’ decision.The Supreme Court on Monday allowed congressional maps that had been approved by state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania to stand, giving Democrats an advantage in this year’s election in two key states.In issuing the orders, the Supreme Court rejected requests by Republicans to restore maps approved by G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures. Those district lines were thrown out and replaced by courts in both states after challenges by Democrats.Under the new court-imposed maps in both states, Democrats are likely to gain more seats than they would have under the legislature-approved versions.But in the North Carolina case, there were signs that at least four of the court’s more conservative justices could later rule that state courts are powerless to change congressional maps adopted by state legislatures.Such a ruling would fundamentally alter how congressional elections are conducted and amplify partisan gerrymandering, allowing the party that controls the legislature to draw voting districts favoring its candidates.But that will not happen before this fall’s election.Stanton Jones, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs who had challenged the North Carolina map, said the Supreme Court’s order meant that “North Carolina voters will now be able to vote in free and fair congressional elections this year.”He said that for now, the order signaled an end to “a decade of extreme Republican gerrymanders.”Still, the court’s three most conservative members — Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch — said they would have blocked the North Carolina map because it was likely that the State Supreme Court had violated the Constitution in overriding the State Legislature.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Legal Battles: The U.S. Supreme Court let stand voting maps that had been approved by state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, giving Democrats a temporary win.“There must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” Justice Alito wrote.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh filed a short concurring opinion agreeing that the question posed by the case was a substantial one. But he said the court should address it in the ordinary course rather than in response to an emergency application.Taken together, the two opinions suggested that there are four justices ready to add a case on the question to the court’s docket when it is next presented in a petition seeking the court’s review rather than on what critics call the court’s shadow docket. It takes four votes to grant such review.But it takes five votes to prevail. The swing vote would almost certainly belong to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.In a second order in the Pennsylvania case, the court provisionally turned down a similar application on technical grounds without noted dissent.The North Carolina Supreme Court had rejected a map drawn by Republican lawmakers that effectively gave their party at least 10 of the state’s 14 House seats, notwithstanding that voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.A three-judge panel of the state Superior Court in Raleigh instead adopted a new map drawn by a nonpartisan panel of redistricting experts that appeared to split North Carolina’s congressional districts roughly equally between Republicans and Democrats. It gave each party six relatively safe House seats and made the other two competitive.After the State Supreme Court refused to block that ruling, Republican state officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in.In the Pennsylvania case, the State Supreme Court adopted a map that appears to give Republicans nine fairly safe seats and Democrats eight, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Each party currently holds nine House seats, but Pennsylvania will lose a seat next year because of reapportionment after the 2020 census.Voters and a Republican candidate for the House sued state officials in federal court to challenge the new map. When they did not receive immediate relief, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.Both emergency applications relied on the Elections Clause of the Constitution, which says “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” That meant, the challengers argued, that the state legislature has sole responsibility for drawing congressional districts and that state courts have no role to play.“The question presented here,” North Carolina Republicans wrote in their application, “goes to the very core of this nation’s democratic republic: what entity has the constitutional authority to set the rules of the road for federal elections.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      In North Carolina, a Pitched Battle Over Gerrymanders and Justices

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      A fight over who is fit to hear a redistricting case highlights what experts say is the growing influence of ideology and money over state supreme courts nationwide.It is the state that put the hyper in partisan politics, setting the blunt-force standard for battles over voting rights and gerrymanders that are now fracturing states nationwide.So it is unsurprising that North Carolina’s latest battle, over new political maps that decisively favor Republicans, is unfolding in what has become an increasingly contested and influential battlefield in American governance: the State Supreme Court.The court meets on Wednesday to consider whether a map drawn by the Republican-dominated legislature that gives as many as 11 of 14 seats in the next Congress to Republicans — in a state almost evenly divided politically — violates the State Constitution. Similarly lopsided state legislative maps are also being contested.But for weeks, both sides of a lawsuit have been waging an extraordinary battle over whether three of the court’s seven justices should even hear the case. Atop that, an influential former chairman of the state Republican Party has suggested that the legislature could impeach some Democratic justices, a move that could remove them from the bench until their fates were decided.The central issue — whether familial, political or personal relationships have rendered the justices unfit to decide the case — is hardly frivolous. But the subtext is hard to ignore: The Supreme Court has a one-justice Democratic majority that could well invalidate the Republican-drawn maps. Knocking justices off the case could change that calculus.“I think we’re at the brass-knuckles level of political fighting in this state,” said Michael Bitzer, a scholar of North Carolina politics at Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. “It is a microcosm of the partisan polarization that I think we’re all experiencing. It’s just that here, it’s on steroids.”It also is a reminder that for all the attention on the U.S. Supreme Court this week after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, it is in Supreme Courts in states like North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio that many of the most explosive questions about the condition of American democracy are playing out.State Supreme Courts have become especially critical forums since the U.S. Supreme Court said in 2019 that partisan gerrymanders were political matters outside its reach.In North Carolina, the justices seem likely to reject calls for their recusal. The court said last month that individual justices would evaluate charges against themselves unless those justices asked the full court to rule.But the high stakes reflect what may happen elsewhere — and in some cases, already has. In Ohio, Justice Pat DeWine of the State Supreme Court rebuffed calls last fall to recuse himself from redistricting lawsuits in which his father — Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican — was a defendant. Days later, the state Republican Party urged a Democratic justice, Jennifer Brenner, to recuse herself because she had made redistricting an issue when running for office.Nationwide, 38 of 50 states elect justices for their highest court rather than appoint them. For decades, those races got scant attention. But a growing partisan split is turning what once were sleepy races for judicial sinecures into frontline battles for ideological dominance of courts with enormous sway over peoples’ lives.The U.S. Supreme Court issued 68 opinions in its last term. State Supreme Courts decide more than 10,000 cases every year. Increasingly, businesses and advocacy groups turn to them for rulings on crucial issues — gerrymandering is one, abortion another — where federal courts have been hostile or unavailing.Campaign spending underscores the trend. A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, at New York University, concluded that a record $97 million was spent on 76 State Supreme Court races in the most recent election cycle. Well over four in 10 dollars came from political parties and interest groups, including the conservative nonprofit Judicial Crisis Network, which has financed national campaigns backing recent Republican nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.Most interest group spending has involved so-called dark money, in which donors’ identities are hidden. Conservative groups spent $18.9 million in the 2019-20 cycle, the report stated, but liberal groups, which spent $14.9 million, are fast catching up.The money has brought results. In 2019, a $1.3 million barrage of last-minute advertising by the Republican State Leadership Committee was credited with giving the G.O.P.-backed candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brian Hagedorn, a 6,000-vote victory out of 1.2 million cast.Liberal groups have not matched that success. But they have outspent conservatives in recent races in Michigan and North Carolina.“Two things are happening,” said Douglas Keith, a co-author of the Brennan Center report. “There are in-state financial interests that know these courts are really important for their bottom lines, so they’re putting money toward defeating or supporting justices to that end. And there are also national partisan infrastructures that know how important these courts are to any number of high-profile issues, and probably to issues around democracy and elections.”How important is easy to overlook. It is well known, for example, that President Donald J. Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were rejected by every court where he filed suit, save one minor ruling. But when Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar and president of the nonpartisan Governance Institute, analyzed individual judges’ votes, he found a different pattern: 27 of the 123 state court judges who heard the cases actually supported Mr. Trump’s arguments.Twenty-one of the 27 held elected posts on State Supreme Courts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Both Michigan and Wisconsin are among the top five states in spending for Supreme Court races, the Brennan Center study found.Mr. Keith called that a red flag, signaling the rising influence of money in determining which judges define the rules for political behavior.North Carolina is another top-five state. Of $10.5 million spent on the state’s Supreme Court races in 2020, $6.2 million was devoted to a single race, for chief justice. Both figures are state records.The court has become increasingly partisan, largely at the Republican legislature’s behest. Legislators ended public financing for Supreme Court races in 2013, and made elections partisan contests in 2016.Anita Earls is one of three justices accused of conflict of interest in the redistricting case.Julia Wall/The News & Observer, via Associated PressBut Dallas Woodhouse, a former state Republican Party chair and columnist for the conservative Carolina Journal, said blame for the current tempest lay not with Republicans, but their critics. They kicked off the recusal battle last summer, he said, when the state N.A.A.C.P. sought to force two Republican justices to withdraw from a case challenging two referendums for constitutional amendments.Mr. Woodhouse crusaded against the demands in his columns, and the Supreme Court left the decision up to the justices, both of whom said this month that they would hear the case.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Ohio Supreme Court Strikes Down Republican Gerrymander of Map

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      The congressional map would have given Republicans an advantage of 12 seats to three in elections for the House of Representatives.The Ohio Supreme Court struck down a congressional map skewed to favor Republicans on Friday, ruling that it was the equivalent of a dealer stacking the deck, and sent it back to state lawmakers to try again.The map would have given Republicans an advantage of 12 seats to three in elections for the House of Representatives, even though the G.O.P. has lately won only about 55 percent of the statewide popular vote.“This is not what Ohio voters wanted or expected,’’ the court said of the map.Mapmakers in Ohio are not allowed to unduly favor one party in redistricting, after voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment to the Ohio Constitution in 2018. The proposed map was drawn by Republicans in the Legislature and passed without Democratic support, and the court rejected it in a 4-to-3 decision.“When the dealer stacks the deck in advance, the house usually wins,” wrote Justice Michael Donnelly for the majority, adding that the Republicans’ plan was “infused with undue partisan bias.”The constitutional amendment was an effort to end partisan gerrymandering in the state, and the voting rights groups that brought the suit, including the League of Women Voters of Ohio, argued that Republican lawmakers had ignored the law. Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.The court agreed, holding that the evidence “makes clear beyond all doubt that the General Assembly did not heed the clarion call sent by Ohio voters to stop political gerrymandering.”When the case was heard last month, Republicans argued that the districts were fair and met the Constitution’s demand to not to be “unduly” favorable, and that Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat re-elected in 2018, would have carried eight of the 15 new districts. Republicans further said that they had drawn six competitive House seats.In signing the map into law in November, Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican facing a primary challenge from his right this year, called the G.O.P. plan “a fair, compact and competitive map.”But the court strongly disagreed. It said the Republicans’ plan violated the law by splitting Democratic-leaning counties in order to dilute their votes, including Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati. Hamilton County was split between three newly drawn districts “for no apparent reason other than to confer an undue partisan advantage on the Republican Party,’’ the court said. A spokesman for Republican leaders in the Legislature said they were reviewing the court’s opinion.Lawmakers have 30 days to overhaul the congressional maps. If they fail, the mapmaking passes to the Ohio Redistricting Commission, which would be given another 30 days. But there is a tighter deadline looming: March 4, when candidates must file paperwork to run. The court’s decision came two days after it threw out Republican-drawn maps for new state House and Senate districts. How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.In both cases, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, joined three Democratic justices to overturn the maps. A congressional map acceptable to the court could give Democrats two to three more seats in Ohio, some analysts said. Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      We Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and Elections

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and ElectionsThe justices are about to consider whether the Voting Rights Act applies to policies that restrict the vote.Contributing Opinion WriterFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesWhen the Supreme Court on Monday rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ after-the-fact effort to invalidate late-arriving mailed ballots, it was tempting to suppose that the country’s courthouse doors had finally closed on this most litigated of presidential elections.If only it were that simple.True, in denying the Republicans’ petitions, the court didn’t issue an opinion. Of the four votes necessary to accept a case, these two cases (treated by the court as one) garnered only three. So for the official record, the only outcome in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. DeGraffenreid and in Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party was “denied.”But the three justices who would have accepted the cases — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — issued dissenting opinions that provide both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature. Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.Justice Alito, in a separate dissenting opinion that Justice Gorsuch also signed, was more circumspect about the fraud issue. His emphasis was the urgency of stopping state courts from substituting their judgment for that of the legislatures. He said that even though the election was over and late ballots were too few to have made a difference in Pennsylvania’s vote totals, state courts could be expected to behave in the same way in the future unless the Supreme Court used this occasion to stop them.There are several things to note about the Pennsylvania cases. The most obvious is the absence of a fourth vote. In an initial round in the Pennsylvania cases, in mid-October, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had provided Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch with a fourth vote to grant a stay of the state court decision. But a stay requires five votes rather than four. With Amy Coney Barrett not yet confirmed, the eight justices divided 4 to 4, and the stay was denied without opinions. Justice Kavanaugh withheld his vote on Monday, without explanation. Maybe he decided this was a propitious time to offer some cover for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has voted in nearly all the election cases this fall with the three remaining liberal justices.Justice Barrett was also silent. During her confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats had pressed her to promise recusal from any election cases, given that President Donald Trump had said he needed a prompt replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that he would have a majority of justices voting his way in any election disputes. Justice Barrett did not recuse herself from the Pennsylvania case. Perhaps her decision not to provide the fourth vote her dissenting colleagues needed was a kind of de facto recusal, in recognition that the optics of voting to hear a last-ditch Trump appeal would be awkward, to say the least.The deeper question raised by Monday’s development is why Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are so intent on what would seem to be a counterintuitive goal for conservatives: curbing the power of state courts. I’m cynical enough to think it has to do with how these three understand the position of state legislatures and state courts in today’s political climate. It’s been widely reported that Republican-controlled legislatures are rolling out bills by the dozens to restrict access to the polls, aimed at discouraging the kind of turnout that produced Democratic victories in Georgia last month. The vote-suppression effort has become so aggressive that some Republicans are starting to worry about voter backlash, according to a recent Washington Post article.State courts, on the other hand, are capable of standing in the way of this strategy. When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.So there is no way the Supreme Court is finished with elections. Next Tuesday, as it happens, the justices will hear a crucial voting rights case. The case, from Arizona, asks the court to decide for the first time how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote, through such measures as voter ID requirements.Section 2, which pertains nationwide, is the major remaining provision of the Voting Rights Actfollowing the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the act’s Section 5, in the 2013 Shelby County case. That section barred certain states and smaller jurisdictions from making changes in their election procedures without first receiving federal permission, known as “preclearance.” Section 5 provided vital protection in parts of the country where racism had not released its grip on the levers of power.The issue now is whether Section 2 can be deployed to fill that gap. It prohibits any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” It has typically been used to challenge redistricting plans that dilute the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities. The question of whether it can be useful in challenging the wave of vote-suppression schemes, which can present complex problems of proof, hands the justices arguably the most important civil rights case of their current term.With the country exhausted and still reeling from the turmoil of the 2020 election and its bizarre aftermath, the urge not to think about elections for a while is powerful. I share it. But it’s a luxury the Supreme Court hasn’t given us, not now, not as long as some justices have more to say.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More