I’m going to start this update off with a bummer of a legal analysis from Vox’s Ian Millhiser:
The Texas case, meanwhile, is Texas Democratic Party v. Abbott, and the stakes in that case are simply enormous.
Texas law permits voters over the age of 65 to request absentee ballots without difficulty. But most voters under the age of 65 are not allowed to vote absentee. During a pandemic election, that means that older voters — a demographic that has historically favored Republicans over Democrats — will have a fairly easy time participating in the November election. But younger voters will likely have to risk infection at an in-person polling site if they wish to cast a ballot.
This arrangement is difficult to square with the 26th Amendment, which provides that “the right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.”
The Court’s order in Texas Democratic Party is subtle, but it most likely means that Texas will be able to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of age, at least during the November election.
Last month, the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked a trial judge’s order that would have allowed younger Texans to vote absentee. Although this Fifth Circuit order is not the appeals court’s last word on this case, it is quite unlikely that the plaintiffs in Texas Democratic Party will prevail before the Fifth Circuit, which is among the most conservative courts in the country.
So those plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to hear their case on an expedited basis. On Friday, the Supreme Court denied that request. As a practical matter, writes SCOTUSBlog’s Amy Howe, this refusal to expedite the Texas Democratic Party case “all but eliminated the prospect that the justices will weigh in on the merits of that dispute before the 2020 election in November.”
Thus, even if the Supreme Court ultimately does decide that Texas’s age discrimination violates the 26th Amendment, that decision will almost certainly come too late to benefit anyone in November.
The Supreme Court’s orders in Merrill and Texas Democratic Party fit a pattern. Last April, in Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court granted a request from the Republican Party, and ordered all ballots mailed after a certain date in Wisconsin’s April elections to be tossed out — a decision that, in practice, likely forced thousands of voters to risk infection in order to cast an in-person ballot.
The Court’s decision in Republican National Committee was also 5-4, with all five Republican justices in the majority and all four Democrats in dissent.
In recent weeks, the Court has handed down a handful of left-leaning decisions — including a narrow decision temporarily preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and an even narrower decision striking down a Louisiana anti-abortion law.
But on the most important question in a democracy — whether citizens are empowered to choose their own leaders — this Supreme Court remains unsympathetic to parties seeking to protect the right to vote, despite the greatest public health crisis in more than a century.
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern drew similar conclusions. None of this means that these cases won’t get heard on their merits – this one, the other one that directly challenged the 65-and-over provision on 26th amendment grounds, and the lawsuit alleging other obstacles to voting – will get their day in court, and the age discrimination claims will have a decent shot at prevailing. Just, not before this election. It’ll happen eventually, in the fullness of time, because obviously there was no pressing need to address this matter now. Who ever heard of such a thing?
Anyway. Here are the updated early vote totals:
Election Mail Early Total Mail %
===========================================
D primary 19,400 66,318 85,718 22.6%
R primary 20,393 55,489 75,882 26.9%
D runoff 38,066 40,301 78,367 48.6%
R runoff 23,589 11,795 35,384 66.7%
The Wednesday runoff EV file is here, and the final EV turnout report from March is here. Today happened to be a quiet day for mail ballots on the Dem side, but a new high for in person votes. It’s possible Dems will get to 100K by the end of the EV period. My guess is that a large majority of the vote will be cast early, but we’ll see.