Absentee ballot dispute reaches Court
on Nov 3, 2006 at 8:48 pm
UPDATE, Sunday, Nov. 5: The Supreme Court on Saturday afternoon cleared the way for Texas officials to continue to enforce new restrictions on aiding others to cast absentee ballots. In a brief order, found here, the Court refused to block a Fifth Circuit Court order permitting the enforcement through Tuesday’s election. Justice David H. Souter noted that he would have granted the application in Ray v. Abbott (06A466).
A group of Texans who have been helping elderly and disabled voters cast absentee ballots by mail asked the Supreme Court on Friday to block enforcement of a state law that they claim will impede the assistance they are providing, and result in ballots not being counted in next Tuesday’s election. The application also contended that enforcement of the state law have been having the greatest impact on black, Hispanic and Democratic voters. Here is the text of the application (not yet numbered) in Ray, et al., v. Abbott, et al.
The application in Ray v. Texas was submitted to Justice Antonin Scalia, who handles emergency matters from the Fifth Circuit. Earlier Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court lifted a federal judge’s order to block a provision that makes it a crime in some circumstances for one person to have in their possession an absentee ballot being cast by another, even though the ballot is merely being carried to a mail box.
The lawsuit originally filed on Sept. 21 was a much broader challenge to a series of laws passed by the Texas legislature in 2003 designed to curb alleged fraud in the absentee balloting process. U.S. District Judge T. John Ward of Marshall on Tuesday blocked only the parts of the law dealing with casting the ballots by mail, and provided protection for that process only when done with the specific consent of the voter. Judge Ward kept in effect the authority of state officials to require that any ballot dropped in the mail must have, on the envelope, identifying information about the person doing the mailing on behalf of the voter. A ballot cast in violation of the state law will not be counted, the law provides.
The part of the order blocking the possession provision was vacated by the Fifth Circuit in an unexplained order Friday, at the request of state officials. One judge on the panel suggested in a brief concurring opinion that the state law involved “overly broad criminalization” of the assistance to absentee voters, but said whether it was causing any harm was “somewhat speculative” at this point.
In their application to Justice Scalia, the voting assistants and one absentee voters, along with the state’s Democratic Party, contends that the state is discriminating in its enforcement of the law, and is intimidating absentee voters and the people who are helping them prepare and cast their ballots by mail.
