The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Arizona, at least for now, to toughen some voting requirements, saying that people registering to vote before the coming election must show proof of citizenship.
The decision, issued in a terse, unsigned order, handed a partial victory to Republicans who supported a 2022 Arizona law imposing new restrictions on voting. But the court declined to allow Arizona to put into effect another part of that law, which could have prohibited tens of thousands of voters who are already registered from participating in the presidential election or casting any ballots by mail, unless they provided proof of citizenship.
The decision did not include any legal reasoning, which is common in such emergency applications. But there were signs that the court was divided over the issue, and that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh may have split their votes between two factions.
The order did not mention either. But it said four justices had wanted to keep the state from enforcing both measures: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. It named three as wanting to let the state put both provisions into effect: Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.
The mixed decision means Arizonans newly registering to vote for the coming election will have to provide copies of one of several documents, including a birth certificate or a passport, in order to prove their citizenship.
Disputes over voting requirements in Arizona have raged since the 2020 presidential election, when Donald J. Trump narrowly lost the state. Since then, Republican lawmakers have carried out a partisan audit of the election vote count, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the vote-by-mail system that became more prominent because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Republican National Committee, along with state lawmakers, had asked the Supreme Court to weigh in after lower federal courts had blocked enforcement of the new legal limits.
The dispute turns on whether the requirement to show proof of citizenship violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and a 2018 consent decree between the state and the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the nation’s oldest Latino civil rights organizations.
Under that agreement, applicants who cannot show proof of citizenship on their state forms would still be registered to vote if their citizenship could be proved through documents from Arizona’s Transportation Department.
A lower court had blocked both the restriction involving new registrations and the restriction barring already-registered voters from casting ballots by mail or for president if they did not show proof of citizenship. Republicans — the Republican National Committee and some state lawmakers — appealed, asking that the state be allowed to enforce the rules for now as litigation plays out.
Republicans have argued that blocking their tighter election rules interfered with the Arizona Legislature’s constitutional power to determine the manner of voting in federal elections and “to safeguard the purity of all elections in Arizona.”
Such requirements, they have added, were needed to prevent noncitizens from voting; allowing unqualified people to register and cast ballots would dilute the voting rights of legitimate voters and undermine confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.
Latino voting-rights groups, Democratic officials from Arizona and the Biden administration have challenged the measures, contending that the rules violate the civil rights of immigrants and minority voters. Such requirements, they say, could lead to thousands of minority voters being removed from voter rolls.
One of several plaintiff briefs to the justices argued that the Republicans’ theory was “novel and anti-democratic” and urged the court not to intervene so late in the election “to compel the rejection of voters.”
“The available remedy for the R.N.C. is to appeal to Arizona voters, not to block them from political participation,” the brief argued.
State and national Republican officials had urged the justices to act swiftly in part so that if the justices did permit the new legal requirements to be enforced, state election officials would have time to prepare to carry them out. The Arizona secretary of state had a deadline of Thursday to resolve related litigation so that counties could print their ballots in time.
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