The Court’s order reads in full as follows:

Application (24A164) is granted in part and denied in part by the Court. The district court’s May 2, 2024 judgment is stayed only to the extent it enjoins enforcement of Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 16-121.01(C) (2023) pending disposition of the appeals in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if any such writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court. The application is denied as to Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 16-121.01(E) and 16-127(A). Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, and Justice Gorsuch would grant the application in full. Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, Justice Barrett, and Justice Jackson would deny the application in full.

The AZ law that the Court’s order allows to be enforced while this case works its way through the system is one that lets Arizona not accept the voter registrations of voters who register using a state-created form and who do not provide documentary proof of citizenship while registering. Voters who register using the federal form (a form prescribed by Congress through the National Voter Registration Act) will be allowed to vote, but only for federal offices.

The trial court had declined to enforce this law for a number of reasons, including that it looked like an earlier consent decree in another case barred its enforcement. Today the Court allows this to go through and be enforced. (The court allowed the other parts of the AZ law that the trial court had put on hold to remain on hold.)

The upshot is that people who register with the state-only form are going to have to either provide documentary proof of citizenship if they want to vote in all elections in Arizona in the fall, or they will be able to register using the federal form without documentary proof of citizenship only for President, Senate, and Congressional races. [UPDATE: An earlier version of this post suggested that those who had registered using the state form would have to reregister. It appears that this will only be for registrations going forward, and not be applied retroactively for now.]

Unlike voter id laws, that often have not been shown to have a big effect on turnout, these documentary proof of citizenship laws matter a lot. They stand to literally disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters for no good reason.

To put it another way, the law that AZ put in place that the Court today allows to be enforced is bad and unnecessary. As I explain in the first chapter of my 2020 book Election Meltdown, the law is based upon the false premise that noncitizen voting is a large problem in the United States. It is not, as the federal case in Kansas, Fish v. Kobach, definitively showed.

Finally, it is worth noting the three camps that the Court is starting to divide in in these voting cases. You’ve got the three hard core conservatives who are happy to uphold restrictive voting rules on the flimsiest of arguments. You have the three liberals, sometimes joined by Justice Barrett, in not willing to go so far, especially on the emergency docket. And you’ve got Roberts and Kavanaugh in the driver’s seat. I suspect that’s where they like to be.