The Supreme Court has reinstated witness requirements for mail-in ballots in South Carolina, furthering its nearly uninterrupted string of decisions against relaxed burdens on voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
Monday night's ruling brings to eight cases, out of nine considered this year, where the justices have come down on the side of making elections more complicated or restrictive rather than simpler and more open. Several more appeals are sure to be considered before the presidential contest ends in four weeks — including a ruling likely this week on whether ballots delayed in the mail in tossup Pennsylvania up to three days beyond Election Day should still count.
And lower state and federal courts continue to order more easements — some of which could also end up before the Supreme Court. Just Monday, judges put a halt on the witness mandate for mail ballots in Alaska, extended the registration deadline in battleground Arizona and relaxed absentee ballot rules in tossup Iowa.
These are details of the latest developments:
South Carolina
The high court reversed lower federal appeals and trial courts, which concluded the requirement that a mail ballot be countersigned should be suspended this fall because it would otherwise disenfranchise South Carolinians — by conditioning their ability to vote absentee on doing what physicians counsel against and coming in close physical contact with someone else.
The court did allow the tabulating of ballots already returned without a witness signature or already in the mail — although Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said those should be rejected as well.
It was the first Supreme Court ruling in an election case in eight weeks, since the primaries ended and since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The most recent, in August, was also about witness requirements but it is the only one where the court has come down on the side of easier voting this year. And that was only because, the justices said, the state of Rhode Island had agreed to relax its own rules in order to settle a lawsuit.
In South Carolina, by contrast, the Legislature just weeks ago had rejected a proposal to abandon the witness rule. That was one reason it should be allowed to remain, wrote Brett Kavanaugh, the only justice who offered a rationale for the court's decision
The other reason is similar to what has undergirded most of the other decisions this year allowing restrictive election rules to remain.
The Supreme Court "has repeatedly emphasized that federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election," he wrote, citing what has become known as the Purcell Principle, a reference to a 14-year-old decision that an appeals court had waited too close to Election Day before striking down Arizona's voter ID law.
The ruling will change the rules for more than 150,000 ballots already mailed to voters. Although President Trump can count on the state's nine electoral votes, it is now hosting one of the most surprisingly competitive Senate races in the nation — between incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham and former state Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison.
Alaska
Finding a witness for mailed ballots in a pandemic "impermissibly burdens the right to vote," Superior Court Judge Dani Crosby said in ordering the state to quickly figure out how to tell voters they can skip the requirement in November.
Instead state officials signaled they would appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court, arguing the witness rule prevents fraud and that changing requirements so close to the election would cause unfair voter confusion. Ballot envelopes describing the requirement have already been printed.
The judge said there was no evidence the witness requirement had helped detect cheaters and that there are plenty of ways to educate voters the rule has been suspended.
The case was brought by Arctic Village Council, a tribal government, and two people who said they were too sick to find a witness.
Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma and Virginia have voluntarily relaxed notary or witness signature requirements for the year.
Trump seems assured of the state's three electoral votes, but the GOP is working harder than expected to hold a Senate seat and the state's single House seat.
Arizona
The period for registering to vote in the state was to have ended Monday. But federal Judge Steven Logan of Phoenix extended the deadline 18 days, until Oct. 23, saying the added time was necessary to help in-person registration efforts stymied by fears of Covid-19. Online registration is insufficient, he said, because so many Arizonans lack easy or affordable access to the internet.
The Republican National Committee has already filed its appeal, arguing the pandemic was not the sort of big burden on voter registration drives described by the plaintiffs, Mi Familia Vota and Arizona Coalition for Change.
Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, also opposed moving the deadline, warning it would create too much work for local clerks because early in-person voting begins Wednesday — and huge complications fulfilling mail-in ballot applications that are part of new registration forms.
Arizona is one of the 15 states that have deadlines a month before Election Day. At the other end of the spectrum, 19 states allow citizens to both register and cast ballots on Election Day.
Former Vice President Joe Biden is ahead in the race for the state's 11 electoral votes, several recent polls show, and would be the first Democrat to carry the state in six elections. Republican Sen. Martha McSally has become an underdog in her race for reelection against the Democratic candidate, former astronaut Mark Kelly.
Iowa
State Judge Robert Hanson said it was fine for county officials to fill in the name and address lines on absentee ballot applications before sending them to the voters who requested the forms.
That has been long-standing practice in much of the state, where voting by mail has not been widely used before this year. But the surge of remote voting because of the pandemic prompted Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, to tell the local officials this summer they could send only blank applications. Predictably, he cited possible fraud as his rationale. Just as predictably, Democrats then sued.
"It completely escapes this court how the fairness and uniformity of the absentee ballot-application process could possibly be threatened by allowing county auditors to simply continue practices they had been following for some time," the judge ruled, and there is an "almost complete" lack of evidence more absentee voting would result in increased voter fraud.
Monday was the first day for early in-person voting in Iowa and the first day for sending out requested absentee ballots — more than 633,000 so far, smashing state records in large measure because the state's top two contests are highly competitive. Iowa's six electoral votes are a tossup, as is GOP Sen. Joni Ernst's battle for a second term against Democrat Theresa Greenfield.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.