United States: Severe deadlock in the Supreme Court – politics

In an election where every vote counts, all tricks are sometimes fought. But what the Republicans were doing in Pennsylvania went too far. They wanted a court to bar state electoral authorities from counting the ballots they received after Election Day on November 3. Specifically, that could have meant: A voter who regularly requested their vote-by-mail papers, filled them out, and then submitted them shortly before Election Day could have been stripped of their vote because the post office was hanging around.

The United States Constitutional Court has ruled that such a rigid deadline rule is not permissible. The justices on Monday refused to overturn an identical Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling. Accordingly, all mail-in ballots that have been postmarked by the post office on or before November 3 and received by the authorities no later than three days after Election Day must be counted. Even that doesn’t guarantee that every vote cast by mail is actually counted – the US Postal Service is not famous for its speed. But three days should be long enough to deliver most ballots.

Politically, the ruling is a clear victory for Democrats and their candidate Joe Biden. Republican Donald Trump won in Pennsylvania four years ago, but right now Biden is ahead in the polls there. If Biden were to win in Pennsylvania, it would be another big step in his goal of ousting Trump from the presidency. The state has 20 votes in the Electoral College, the body that formally elects the president of the United States. But since many more Democrats are voting by letter than Republicans this year due to the crown pandemic, it is extremely important to Biden that all vote-by-mail ballots are counted.

For Republicans, it works the other way around. They expect the majority of their voters to vote in person on Election Day. They do not expect a decisive increase in votes on vote-by-mail documents that arrive later. Therefore, they had argued in court that irregularities could arise if the ballots were accepted after 3 November. Scammers won’t be able to fill out their forms until November 4-5. The judges obviously considered this risk to be low.

However, not all judges. Since the death of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the United States Constitutional Court has only eight members instead of nine. And four of these justices, all of whom are from the conservative wing of the court, voted Monday for the Republican-required term regulation. The failure to achieve a majority was solely due to the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts voted against with all three Liberal justices. In the event of a vote in the Supreme Court, the decision of the previous instance remains valid, in this case, the judgment of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which dismissed the claim of the Republicans.

Little stands in the way of Barrett’s confirmation

This unusual four-to-four constellation on the Supreme Court illustrates very clearly why Republicans absolutely want Ginsburg’s successor candidate, Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, to be confirmed by the Senate before the election. It is probably not unrealistic speculation that Barrett would have voted with the other four Conservative justices in the present case. The regulation of the deadline would have received a majority of five to four votes, the electoral offices would not have been able to consider the vote-by-mail documents they received after November 3.

That could have had decisive consequences for the outcome of the Pennsylvania election. In 2016, Trump received 48.18 percent of the votes in the state, while Democrat Hillary Clinton obtained 47.46 percent, a difference of 0.72 points. In the end, only 44,000 votes separated the two candidates.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Barrett’s appeal to the Supreme Court later this week. The vote in plenary should continue next week. Given that Republicans have a majority in the Senate, there are few obstacles in the way of Barrett’s confirmation.