Supreme Court Used Bullsh*t Data From DOJ Hacks To Kill Voting Rights Act, Surprise!

OMFG and LOL.

At least the Phillies suck this year.

As Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts whines and pisses and moans about people thinking he’s — heaven forfend! — some sort of partisan, would it surprise you to learn that the data the Court’s majority opinion in Louisiana v. Callais relied on to flush what was left of the Voting Rights Act down history’s toilet appears to have been faulty? And that faulty data was provided in a “friend of the court” brief by our extremely compromised Department of Justice, which has spent the last year-plus turning itself into Donald Trump’s personal law firm?

You are not surprised? Congratulations on being alive in the year 2026. It sucks!

The Guardian reports that when Justice Sam Alito wrote the majority opinion in Callais, he noted that because Black turnout had been higher than white turnout in two of the last five presidential elections in Louisiana, ergo and ipso facto, racism must be over and there is no longer any need for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to exist. He took the evidence about turnout almost “verbatim” from the DOJ’s brief.

This argument was already suspect because the two elections mentioned were in 2012 and 2016. In the former, Barack Obama was on the ballot, which naturally juiced Black turnout. In the second, well, there have been two presidential elections since then, so how is this relevant? The electorate and some voting laws have changed. The Shelby County decision in 2013, which Roberts wrote, has also contributed to Black turnout decline.

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Another way you could say it is that white turnout has still been higher than Black in three of the last five elections despite the VRA’s efforts to ameliorate that. But that would lead the conservatives on SCOTUS to a different conclusion, so they didn’t.

Now it turns out that even the formula used to reach the conclusion about Black turnout in 2012 and 2016 might have been faulty anyway:

The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote.

But there is a more widespread way of calculating these numbers, and that is to consider turnout as a proportion of the voter eligible population, not the total over-18 population. The voter eligible population would exclude those people with felony convictions or other reasons they can’t vote (citizenship status, mental incapacitation, what have you). The over-18 population would not.

Michael McDonald, a political scientist who studies voter turnout, told The Guardian that one reason for using the total over-18 population as the denominator is to “manipulate” the numbers to make them more favorable to the government’s case:

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

Whoever calculated the turnout rate could also presumably say they are accounting for the widespread voting by illegal aliens that conservatives are convinced happens despite no evidence that it does so. As the saying goes, figures don’t lie, but liars figure.

The Guardian claims to have also reviewed data from the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office, which uses yet a third way to calculate Black turnout. That method shows that Black turnout has not exceeded white turnout in any of those past five elections that Alito mentioned.

One of the signers of the DOJ brief, by the way, is Harmeet Dhillon, a former Fox talking head. Dhillon runs DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which she has reoriented to investigate all the ways that institutions and laws discriminate against white people. You didn’t think she’d sign a brief that was honest, did you?

The best part of all this statistical fuckery that helped Alito make his (bad) case is that John Roberts was out here this week whining about how it hurts his feelings when people think the Supreme Court is partisan.

From NBC News:

“I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

We’re not politicians making policy decisions, it just so happens by an incredible coincidence that all our opinions reorient policy in a conservative direction!

For fuck’s sake. The Federalist Society did not spend decades grooming conservative hacks to get on the Supreme Court and grooming conservative politicians to put them there because it thought they would interpret the Constitution in a neutral, nonpartisan way. Mitch McConnell did not invent a standard for confirming new judges that he could use to hold a seat open for almost a year so Antonin Scalia’s replacement could be made by a Republican because he was committed to a nonpolitical interpretation of the Constitution. It’s all politics!

John Roberts knows this. He’s not this dumb. But he’s also not dumb enough to sit down with interviewers who might hold his feet to the fire by asking him direct questions. Questions like: Are you really this fucking dumb?

Stay tuned for the next SCOTUS decision that pisses everyone off and sends John Roberts into a whiny shame spiral. We’re sure it’s coming down any day.

[The Guardian / NBC News]

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