One of the Best Supreme Court Decisions in Years Is Still Alarming

On the second prong, where the court must balance each side’s interests, Alito swings even harder toward Trump. “As for the equities, the government has a strong interest in enforcing the rule, and implementing it will also ‘enhance the visibility of Federal Ballot Mail’ in order to better detect election fraud,” he wrote. Trump and many other Republicans have asserted for decades that there is widespread fraud in U.S. elections. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this conspiracy theory.

A presidential commission assembled by Trump during his first term found no evidence to support Trump’s false claims that more than three million illegal ballots were cast in the 2016 presidential election, which he won. Investigations launched by the Justice and Homeland Security Departments at Trump’s behest during his first and second terms also found no evidence that elections were compromised. State and local investigators have occasionally found instances of voter impersonation or noncitizens voting in federal elections, but the number of legitimate cases is in the dozens, compared to the billions of ballots cast this century.

Unfortunately, Alito appears to be among those who believe in the conspiracy theory, as well. In 2021, he authored the majority opinion in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which involved a lawsuit against two Arizona voting restrictions. The 6–3 ruling substantially narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act for challenging state elections laws that are facially neutral but racially discriminatory in impact. Though he claims to be a textualist, Alito invented multiple exceptions to the VRA’s provisions out of whole cloth, including one that allows states to evade VRA lawsuits if they claim to be acting to prevent voter fraud.