Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Undermines Voting Rights and Itself

“The court’s conservatives clearly believe that racial disparities in voting results aren’t a problem. That’s a convenient view for Republicans to hold in this day and age.”

July 1, 2021 at 4:29 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

It just got harder.
Photographer: Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

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The Supreme Court struck a double blow with its decision Thursday to narrow the meaning of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The first undermines the ability of courts to police the racial fairness of voting laws. The second undermines the legitimacy of the court itself.

The 6-3 decision split along ideological and partisan lines upheld Arizona laws that disqualified ballots of voters who show up at the wrong precinct and that prohibited third parties from collecting and delivering absentee ballots — the practice conservatives contentiously call ballot harvesting.