Leah Litman in the Atlantic:

The case captions tell much of the story. Republican Party officials, including those in President Trump’s reelection campaign, are trying to stop states’ efforts to expand voting—they are suing to prevent mail-in voting, extensions for counting ballots, and drop-box voting, and intervening in lawsuits in order to defend Republican-led states’ ability to enforce voting restrictions in the midst of the pandemic. The Democratic Party and its voters and interest groups, by contrast, are using litigation to make voting easier for more people to do safely, and not in person, in the midst of the pandemic.

Many of the rulings also break down along these lines. Two district court judges who were appointed by President Barack Obama issued rulings in the Alabama and Wisconsin cases that would have prevented states from enforcing some of their voting restrictions during the coronavirus crisis. In the Florida case, a district judge appointed by President Bill Clinton invalidated the state’s requirement that recently released persons pay court fines and fees before voting when the state would not tell them how much they owed. In the Alabama and Wisconsin cases, the five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court allowed the states to enforce voting restrictions, but the Democratic-appointed justices would not have. In the Florida case, the Republican-controlled U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld Florida’s pay-to-vote scheme. A majority of the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court also allowed Florida to enforce the scheme in the primary election, whereas a majority of Democratic-appointed justices would have prohibited the state from doing so. In the Texas case, a Democratic-appointed district judge invalidated Texas’s law prohibiting voters under the age of 65 from voting without an excuse, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, with two Republican-appointed judges, put that opinion on hold and allowed Texas to enforce the law, because they concluded that the law was likely constitutional. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has a majority of justices elected as Democrats, rejected an attempt to limit late ballots and drop boxes, and a Michigan state-court judge appointed by a Democratic governor expanded the period for counting mail ballots.