“On Voting Rights, Justice Alito Is Stuck in the 1980s”

Linda Greenhouse on Brnovich:

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the six-justice majority insisted that the law should pay little mind to the occasional “inconvenience” of casting a ballot. Justice Elena Kagan’s dissenting opinion, joined by two other justices, accused the majority of taking the “grand and obvious” right to an “equal opportunity to vote” and reducing it to nothing more than “equality-lite.”

The competing visions in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision reflected profoundly different understandings of what law needs to do to keep the basic mechanics of democracy functioning. In that, it offered an almost perfect mirror of the partisan divide over the seemingly simple concept of the right to vote.

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