I have written this analysis for SCOTUSBlog. It begins:

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee is a strange voting rights case. Rather than the typical case, in which a voting rights group representing minority voters sues a state or locality for engaging in electoral discrimination, this case pits the two major political parties against each other, and Republican officials in Arizona against Democratic officials. Amicus briefs from voting rights groups filed in Brnovich exhibit strong concern about preserving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a tool to tackle discriminatory voting laws. Doing so will be tough before a new conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court….

Generally speaking, voting rights lawyers have been reluctant to push the use of Section 2 too aggressively, likely worried that if a case got to the Supreme Court, the increasingly conservative body would weaken Section 2 protections or even find aspects of it unconstitutional. The Democratic Party seemed to have no such worry, and in Brnovich, the party challenges two Arizona policies that are far from the most egregious voting rights violations. One policy prevents Arizona officials from counting votes when voters accidentally cast them in the wrong precinct; the other bars third party groups from collecting mail-in ballots (a practice pejoratively referred to as “ballot harvesting”).

The Democratic Party’s aggressiveness in using Section 2 in this case, and the deeply split en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decision siding with the Democrats, has provided an opportunity for the state’s Republican Party, its Republican attorney general and the Trump administration (which filed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States before Donald Trump left office) to suggest various ways to read Section 2 as applied to vote denial claims in very stingy ways. From an enhanced “proximate causation” requirement suggested by the United States, to a carve-out from Section 2 for laws that affect voter “qualifications” or “time, place, and manner” restrictions for voting, the briefs filed by Republicans look for ways to drain Section 2 of all of its powers to be used in the vote denial context.

It is no wonder then that the brief filed by Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state makes arguments for part of the case to be dismissed on standing grounds and to reject the stingy Section 2 tests proposed by Republicans. A group of prominent election scholars filed a brief asking for the petition to be dismissed as improvidently granted, leaving the lower court opinion in place without making new law. Voting rights amicus briefs argue for preservation of a meaningful Section 2 test for vote denial, and spend little time defending the 9th Circuit’s decision that these particular Arizona laws violate Section 2. Even the Biden administration, in a new letter to the court, does not defend the 9th Circuit’s result; it only seeks to distance itself from the Trump administration’s stingy test for vote denial under the Voting Rights Act.