Supreme Court prevents Idaho group from collecting signatures of online voting initiatives

The Covid-19 age voting process order comes when the conservative majority of the court has rejected other attempts to ease voting-related restrictions due to the pandemic.

The case stems from the actions of Reclaim Idaho, a political action committee that seeks to increase funding for K-12 education. He tried to gather the necessary signatures for a voting initiative, but had to suspend his campaign because he felt uncomfortable looking for signatures during the pandemic.

He claimed that his First Amendment rights were violated when Idaho law was not suspended to allow the group to collect signatures electronically. A district court judge extended the deadlines and ordered the state to accept electronic signatures.

Idaho Governor Brad Little, a Republican, accused the court of taking “control of the Idaho initiative process” and contravening “an almost century-old principle of Idaho law requiring in-person collection of signatures from the petition”.

“No system of checks and balances can support such an arbitrary abandonment of constitutional and statutory electoral responsibilities,” their attorneys told the judges in court documents.

Thursday’s order was unsigned. Court President John Roberts, along with Judge Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, wrote to explain their reasoning for why they voted to block the lower court order.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, accompanied by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented.

It is unclear how the other judges voted, but it would take the votes of five judges to block the order.

“This is not a case about the right to vote, but about how the items are placed on the ballot in the first place,” Roberts wrote in the order Thursday. He said that “reasonable and nondiscretionary restrictions are almost certainly justified by major regulatory interests in the fight against fraud and ensuring that ballots are not filled with initiatives that have not demonstrated sufficient popular support.”

Sotomayor noted that the lower court had required Idaho to “accommodate the delays and risks” introduced by the coronavirus. He noted that a federal appeals court must hear the case on August 11 and if it determines that the lower court’s injunction was “improper,” the state could still skip the initiative in the November vote.