Late Monday night, the Supreme Court issued a ruling blocking a lower court’s decision to force Wisconsin election officials to extend the deadline for accepting mail-in ballots, as long as they were post-marked by Election Day. This decision to limit ballot access was unsurprising given the conservative majority on the court, but as I noted, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion disturbed many readers because of the views it seemed to express about voting and elections.
But there’s a related aspect of Kavanaugh’s opinion that has attracted significant attention in addition to its ideological bent. It was, many commentators noted, extraordinarily sloppy for a Supreme Court ruling. The opinion was riddled with errors, embarrassingly so, and some of which even relate to the substance of his argument.
To be sure, in light of the pandemic, some state legislatures have exercised their Article I, §4, authority over elections and have changed their election rules for the November 2020 election. Of particular relevance here, a few States such as Mississippi no longer require that absentee ballots be received before election day. See, e.g., Miss. Code Ann. §23–15–637 (2020). Other States such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules, including to the election-day deadline for receipt of absentee ballots. [emphasis added] Continue reading.