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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24316 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Does SCOTUS normally "save the best till last"? We have seen a flurry of opinions at the end of the term, and they appear to be in roughly increasing order of importance, with no sign of the 3-4 biggest cases, which I think are:

  • Barbara (Birthright Citizenship)
  • Slaughter (Will SCOTUS overturn Humphrey's Executor and ban Congress from creating executive-branch offices with just-cause removal protection)
  • Cook (In effect, can the President manufacture just cause to remove a Fed governor by indicting them for a serious crime they may or may not have committed)
  • Watson v RNC (Can states count postal votes postmarked before polling day but received after it)

The first three are all "Is this even the same Constitution?" level cases, and noisy idiots on both sides think that Watson is a "Do we still have a functioning democracy?" question, although in my view it is an unimportant technicality of election law. I would say the only cases of this importance which have been decided are Learning Resources (the tariffs) and Callais (race-based redistricting), both of which had strong practical reasons for the majority pushing a decision as fast as possible. Cook and Slaughter weren't even argued late in the term.

So the question I am asking is whether the justices are holding the biggest cases to drop together on the last day of the term out of some daft sense of drama (or more nefariously, to minimise the amount of public and press attention they get compared to dropping them separately), or is there some hitch delaying getting the opinions written. I can definitely imagine the cases being delayed because the justices are writing increasingly angry concurrences and dissents at each other, but it is also within the realms of possibility that there is still substantial haggling about getting to 5 votes. Barbara and Slaughter are both cases where a plurality opinion would embarrass the Court as well as being a practical headache.

I don't see why Watson v RNC is even controversial at all to the point of being a Supreme Court case. In the UK postal votes must be recevied by the close of polling which is absolutely the correct way to do things otherwise even 2 days after polls have closed and counts and recounts have been done if the race is very close it would be possible for a new batch of votes to suddenly turn up because the mail service has been slow and flip the result. Voters and candidates need certainty quickly after polling is concluded about who has won and where we all go from here as a result, the process shouldn't be held hostage by the possibility of some votes turning up 5 days later.

It's not like this is particularly prejudicial to postal voters either, they normally get their ballots many weeks in advance and it's not hard to fill it out (takes minutes) and get it sent off many many weeks before the election. If you delay until the last few days to send off your vote and it gets delayed and doesn't arrive in time then sorry, that's on you.

The question isn't about whether it's controversial, it's about whether Congress in enacting a specific statue, forbade it.

A legislator facing this argument could come up with a cogent reason to agree with you, but that doesn't mean that the law that some past (1934!) Congress chose to write forbids it.

I think that a compromise would be to require postal votes to be date-stamped a week earlier than the date of the election (plus some extra slack when they are sent from out of state). Don't like making your mind up early? Vote in person.

In the unlikely case that some postal votes take more than that, I would still count them simply to disincentivize someone delaying their delivery on purpose. (On the other hand, without a confirmation of delivery it would be easier to just "lose" them altogether.)

Over here in Germany, the mechanics of voting are non-issues. Of course you have to show government-mandated ID to vote. Of course municipal workers try their best (and succeed, as far as I can tell) in making voting easy. Your polling place is often the nearest school, kindergarden or large public building, and you might need to wait five minutes or so. Of course we are using paper ballots, and of course you can observe the counting of the votes.

In the US, there has been a long and proud tradition of voter suppression at least in the southern states. My understanding is that the waiting time in the polling line can be hours. Charitably, digital voting machines are simply a way to shovel government funds to companies, but the intransparency is at least accepted. Besides the other net negatives, this also turns anything about election mechanics into culture war fodder.

Voters and candidates need certainty quickly after polling is concluded about who has won and where we all go from here as a result, the process shouldn't be held hostage by the possibility of some votes turning up 5 days later.

A few days delay knowing who won isn't ideal, but here in Oz we seem to mostly have put up with it in a lot of elections the past couple of decades; it doesn't seem to be a non-negotiable that blows up everything if not observed.

It's controversial because states get to make their own election rules with a very limited set of exceptions (in the case of Presidential elections, only the ones explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, including the date of polling day). So the question isn't "As a matter of policy, should late-arriving postal votes be counted?" It is "Does the Constitution (plus the regular law setting polling day for the Tuesday after Nov 1st) prohibit counting late-arriving postal votes?"

The policy case for counting late-arriving postal votes is that it prevents postal delays (which could be generated maliciously by USPS management or by the postal union) from affecting the result of an election. The policy case against is as you put it, but is weaker in the US context because the overnight count in American elections is explicitly preliminary - the time to formally certify elections is normally 2-3 weeks and the lame duck period is about 2 months in the case of further delays.

(Compare the UK case, where the overnight count, or next-day count if there are multiple local races, is official and there is no lame duck period - we couldn't count late-arriving postal votes without delaying the formation of the incoming government).

Because democrats are officially opposed to anything resembling normal elections. I don't really know why, I don't believe the MASSIVE FRAUD stories, and they're smart enough to know that they don't disenfranchise anyone.

Stories of voter suppression and those dastardly MAGAs trying to rig elections are reliable bait to stoke up the base and get the vote out? Or at least keep the voting blocs reliably voting for you on the basis that "We really do represent you, them over there are trying to take your rights away, including your vote"?

Being maximally cynical, if I'm selling my vote, I want to know there's a market for it. If Party Gamboge candidate needs just one thousand more votes to get over the line, and they wait till they know the margin of votes they need, then my vote is only worth what they will pay me if it gets counted, even if it arrives after close of polling. So I'm motivated to vote Gamboge to keep my vote worth the price they'll pay, if they're the party pushing for "no need for ID, votes that arrive by mail up to three days after the poll closed are eligible to be counted (so long as the postmark is right, and if the postmark is blurry eh we'll give it the benefit of the doubt), and everyone gets to exercise their right to vote even if they need a little help along the way!"

But there probably isn't enough outright buying of votes for this to be happening a lot.

The 'voter suppression' narrative does not work on its target audience(which, when sold on GOP racism, is more likely to be sold on policing issues).

I don't see why Watson v RNC is even controversial at all to the point of being a Supreme Court case.

It's effectively for the same reasons things like mandatory voter id are controversial in the US: claims by the Democrats that it will be used to disenfranchise minorities and similar claims, claims by the Republicans that this is all a cover for election fraud (which the Democrats insist totally never happens except for those times a few decades ago when it totally did but it totally hasn't happened since they swear).

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