UK professor and author of The Court v. the Voters Joshua Douglas argues in his new book that the nation's high court has long trended in a direction that grants more and more leeway to states, when it comes to how they run their elections.
And he says that's creating a system more hostile to voting rights.
Asked in a Zoom Q&A hosted by the League of Women Voters of Kentucky Thursday about how the court might deal with a dispute over the presidential election in the fall, the analyst says there are no direct signals being sent — but he suspects the court would be hesitant to overstep certain boundaries.
In his response, Douglas pointed to the aftermath of the 2020 election.
"(The Supreme Court) was good in the post-2020 election landscape in not allowing any of the crazy lawsuits from Trump and Trump supporters to win the day. So I do think there's a limit to what the court is willing to do with respect to not totally undermining democracy directly. They're doing it indirectly, in my view, through all of these rulings that defers to the states," he said. "But when they're faced with something that is... really just overturning an election, I think the court cares enough about its institutional role in the government that is not going to simply overturn an election result or allow that to occur."
One recent ruling that set off alarms among voting rights advocates was a high court case changing voter registration rules in Arizona, leading observers to worry how the court might approach emergency election appeals.
Douglas notes, for a serious question about the election to be decided by the court, a case first has to reach its docket.
