UPDATE 10:05 AM EDT 7/1/2021: The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Brnovich, Dem elections attorney Marc Elias reports. Below is an intro/analysis by National Zero contributor The Contentious Otter.

Last March the SCOTUS heard oral arguments for two voting cases from the state of Arizona: Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Arizona Republican Party v. Democratic National Committee. Brnovich deals with an out-of-precinct voting law which states that if a voter uses a provisional ballot at a polling place other than the one assigned to them by their local board of elections, then the entire ballot is declared invalid and is thrown out. The Arizona GOP case asks the question of whether a state is compelled to adopt any voting practice likely to be favored by minority voters, even if all other factors are considered to be race neutral.

More conservative court reporters indicated that the conservatives that make up the court’s majority appeared skeptical of both cases. However, other reports indicate that comically bad representation on the part of Arizona Republicans, with “Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, [suggesting] in his brief that states that wish to disenfranchise voters of color may take advantage of existing demographic disparities to target racial minorities, so long as the state does not create those disparities,” and Michael Carvin, the lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party arguing that “that states have broad power to enact laws restricting the “time, place, or manner” where voters cast their ballots.”

The Department of Justice webpage on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act states: “In 1980, the Supreme Court held that the section, as originally enacted by Congress in 1964, was a restatement of the protections afforded by the 15th amendment. Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980). Under that standard, a plaintiff had to prove that the standard, practice, or procedure was enacted or maintained, at least in part, by an invidious purpose.”

This creates a situation where even if the conservative justices did seem skeptical, it may come down to just how persuasive the more liberal justices can be. It appears that the Republican lawyers already described their “individous purposes” openly in court, and as Chief Justice Roberts famously said in the decision from Gamble v. United States: “Justices are required to give litigants the benefit of the doubt, but they aren’t required to demonstrate a naivete that is absent from everyday life.”