On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned, unexplained order reinstating a Virginia policy that is purportedly aimed at removing noncitizens from the voter rolls, but that federal courts have determined will disenfranchise at least some citizens in the process. Technically, the Court’s order is temporary, effective only for as long as litigation continues below. Given that a presidential election is scheduled to take place in six days, at this stage, a “temporary” victory gives the pro-disenfranchisement side everything they really wanted.

All three Democratic justices noted their dissent. It is theoretically possible that one of the Republican justices joined them, albeit without attaching their name. In light of the Republican justices’ long, proud tradition of using their positions of power to tilt elections in favor of their preferred party, this is sort of like saying that when the pack of ravenous wolves took down that deer, maybe one of the wolves ate a little less than the rest. 

The Court’s decisions in this space are often guided by the Purcell principle, a rule that ostensibly discourages judges from making last-minute changes to voting procedures. The rationale is that judges should not be creating “chaos” or “confusion” in the periods leading up to elections, which are already chaotic and confusing enough.

I say “ostensibly” because, in the hands of this conservative supermajority, Purcell means that whichever outcome would disenfranchise more people to the benefit of Republicans is the legally correct answer, no matter how much real-world chaos and confusion results. In Wisconsin in 2020, the Court determined that Purcell barred a modest extension to the deadline for accepting absentee ballots, despite pandemic-induced mail delays that meant that voters who voted absentee might not get counted at all. In Florida, the justices relied on Purcell to block a Republican-backed poll tax, making it impossible for people previously convicted of crimes to know if they could cast a ballot. In Alabama, two weeks before the general election, the justices decided that under Purcell, they no choice but to uphold the Republican secretary of state’s ban on curbside voting, forcing people to balance their desire to participate in democracy against their desire to avoid getting sick and dying if someone coughs on them in line.

The Court stretched the logic of Purcell to a breaking point in 2022, when a lower court struck down a GOP-drawn congressional map in Alabama for discriminating against Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The Court, however, stepped in to keep the map in place; in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that the lower court ran afoul of Purcell because “federal district courts ordinarily should not enjoin state election laws in the period close to an election.” This sounds reasonable enough until you do the math and realize that the decision came nine fucking months before the general election. As a direct result of the justices’ intervention, Alabama held its midterm elections under a map that, sure enough, the Court itself eventually agreed was an illegal gerrymander. It is not a coincidence that this delay blessed Republicans with a free congressional seat.

The precise legal disposition—whether the Court technically stayed a lower court injunction, or allowed one to take effect, or whatever—varies in these cases. So, too, do the time periods before the relevant elections, and the purported dangers of intervention vs. inaction, and the extent of explanation the justices deign to provide. But the upshot is always the same: in situations where the Republican justices do not want people to vote, they enforce an anti-voting rule that compels that result.

The decision in Virginia similarly contravenes everything Purcell is supposed to stand for. It comes down a week before an election. It leaves affected voters unsure of whether they can cast a ballot, or what (if anything) they’ll need in order to do so. (Virginia allows same-day registration, for example, but this “fix” is only useful if people know in advance to bring every document they need to their polling place, just in case.) It upholds a law that explicitly violates the federal National Voter Registration Act, which bars states from “systematically” removing even ineligible voters from the rolls in the 90 days before an election. Purcell is supposed to prevent “chaos”; all this result does is create more of it. 

Again, it is not worth getting too upset about the hypocrisy here, because the justices do not and have never cared about the coherence of their jurisprudence, election-related or otherwise. The ability to enforce a general anti-voting rule is the entire reason conservatives fought to take over the Court: As I’ve written before, the steady erosion of voting rights in this country is Chief Justice John Roberts’s most consequential accomplishment, because every aspect of the conservative agenda depends on its success. Voter suppression works its evil by slowly, steadily nudging the political and legal infrastructure to the right, blessing conservative court wins and Republican election victories alike with the appearance of democratic legitimacy. The conservatives justices’ freedom to bullshit their way through these cases is not a failure of the legal system; it is a privilege that comes with control of it.

Disenfranchising a few thousand voters in Virginia is probably not going to swing the results of the 2024 election. But this is just one of many election-related cases the Court will be expected to decide in the months to come, in a race where the candidates are polling well within the margin of error. By allowing Virginia’s purge to go forward, the Court is signaling that it is as willing as ever—probably even more willing, given how much more pro-Trump the institution is today than it was four years ago—to meddle in elections for the benefit of the Republican Party. Last time, the numbers in swing states were simply not close enough for the justices to expend the political capital necessary to overturn the result. If the margin is narrower this time, they will be much less shy about trying to close it.

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