Derek tries mightily to justify under the Purcell Principle the Supreme Court’s order allowing Arizona, in the weeks before early voting begins, to change one of the rules for voter registration in the state, but not all three of the laws that the RNC wanted changed. I think he’s wrong here, at least when it comes to the supposed purposes behind the principle.

The status quo before the Supreme Court intervened was that people who registered to vote in Arizona with either a state or federal form but without providing sufficient documentary proof of citizenship were eligible to vote in federal races. There was a law on the books in Arizona that would have changed those procedures in a few ways, but three parts of that law had been put on hold by the district court and never enforced. The RNC went to the Supreme Court in the weeks before early voting started to get a change in the status quo, so that the three parts of the law that had been on hold could be enforced. The Supreme Court agreed to allow one of the laws to be enfored now, but did not allow the two others to be enforced.

Before the Supreme Court’s order, the status quo was that a person registering to vote in Arizona using the state form but without providing documentary proof of citizenship could vote in federal races. Under the Supreme Court’s order, starting now in the weeks before the election, an eligible Arizona resident who attempt to register using a state form without providing documentary proof of citizenship will have their registration rejected and therefore may be disenfranchised. (If the same eligible person tried to register using the federal form without providing documentary proof of citizenship, that person would be registered to vote in federal races in Arizona.) (As an aside, this is insane. A person’s voter registration should not depend on the form that they use, and Arizona’s requirement of providing documentary proof of citizenship disenfranchise voters without stopping an appreciable amount of fraud.)

The Supreme Court’s order seems to violate the harm that Purcell flags: “Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.” That’s exactly what’s happening on the ground in Arizona: voter confusion. Use the wrong form now (but not before last week) and—poof!—you are disenfranchised from voting for the President (and for both houses of Congress).

Derek tries to get around this by claiming that the status quo is the law on the books, even if that law was never enforced. Certainly that’s a way of distinguishing the cases applying Purcell that Derek flags, but it sure isn’t consistent with the mischief that Purcell is supposedly remedying. And if Derek were right, why didn’t the Court order the enforcement of two other aspects of the law that the RNC challenged? (Doing so likely would have disenfranchised another 41,000 people from federal elections who had registered with the federal form but who did not provide documentary proof of citizenship.) Those would be the status quo too, no?