Democracy Docket

Democrats, state election chiefs and voting rights advocates cheered the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that lets states continue allowing grace periods for ballots mailed by Election Day. The 5-4 ruling was hailed as a major victory for voting rights, with the nation’s highest court ensuring that millions of voters won’t be disenfranchised just because their mail ballots arrive after Election Day.

This piece was originally written for Democracy Docket members. We’re sharing this one with everyone because today’s ruling is too consequential not to. Become a member to get Marc’s exclusive analysis first. The Republican National Committee thought it had found a new way to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of lawful voters. It spent millions building a case in an attempt to use disenfranchisement as a systematic tool to gain partisan advantage.

President Donald Trump seized on a major U.S. Supreme Court loss for Republicans Monday to push again for the SAVE America Act, a sweeping anti-voting bill. But he acknowledged that passage of the measure is “probably not going to happen.” Trump said that he wanted the SAVE America Act added to a pending housing bill, but conceded that Senate Republican opposition could block it.

A Republican-appointed federal judge in New Hampshire dismissed the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit against the state, which refused the department’s demand to hand over an unredacted copy of its statewide voter registration list. The ruling Monday marks the 11th straight loss for the DOJ, which sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., in an unprecedented effort to obtain unredacted statewide voter registration lists that include sensitive personal data of every registered voter.

President Donald Trump’s multi-front attack on mail voting suffered a stinging judicial defeat Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the GOP in Watson v. Republican National Committee. It was the latest in a string of recent court losses for Trump’s attacks on free and fair elections. While the Supreme Court’s ruling likely puts an end to one prong of the president’s attacks on voting, the battle isn’t over for Trump.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the GOP’s attempt to upend mail voting Monday marked a major win not only for the millions of Americans who vote by mail but also for the millions of other people who cast their ballots in person at early voting sites. If Watson v. Republican National Committee* (RNC) had gone their way, legal and voting experts feared that Republicans would use the ruling to next challenge early voting.

The Colorado Supreme Court killed a set of proposed ballot measures aimed at redrawing the state’s congressional map to counter GOP gerrymanders in other states, finding that they violated the state constitution. Like in past redistricting pushes in California and Virginia, the measures would ask voters to let the state temporarily sidestep the independent redistricting commission and draw a more Democratic-friendly map in response to Republicans’ mid-decade redraws across the country.

The Republican National Committee sued Nevada Friday, marking the third GOP lawsuit against overseas voters within a week and the latest escalation in a fast-moving national campaign to restrict voting access for U.S. citizens abroad. The lawsuit challenges a Nevada law that allows certain Americans living overseas to vote in the state if they were born outside the U.S. and vote based on a parent or legal guardian’s last residence in the state.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s announcement Monday that it will hear a case on two Arizona voting laws could spell danger for a key federal protection that prevents voters from being removed from the rolls right before an election. At issue in the case, in part, is whether states can systematically cancel registrations of alleged noncitizens during the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) 90-day “quiet period” before federal elections.

An anti-voting lawsuit from Republicans seeking to disenfranchise overseas U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in Nevada elections.