The conservatives on the nation’s highest court continue to undermine democracy and the Constitution—and if they have to lie to do it, so be it.
So perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, in which he blithely destroyed the Voting Rights Act, had a major statistical error at the heart of it that undermines a big part of his analysis.
This would be bad enough if it were a genuine error, as that alone should be a five-alarm fire and require a genuine reckoning with what, exactly, is going on at the Supreme Court that a landmark civil rights law can just go poof based on a mistake. But it’s not really an error. Rather, the Department of Justice was selling—and Justice Alito was definitely buying—a convenient lie.
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The DOJ submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in Callais, as the federal government wasn’t a party to the case. But Donald Trump’s DOJ was never going to pass up the opportunity to help dismantle voting rights. That brief had a hook custom-designed to ensnare Alito, a man who thinks he is very smart and not at all driven by his partisan instincts—so he loves to dress up his naked bigotry with a bit of history or math when it suits him.
The DOJ’s brief provided Alito, who basically did a little bit of a cut-and-paste, with one of the major factual underpinnings for his conclusion that we totally fixed racism and therefore the VRA was no longer necessary: Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections.
To say this analysis was flawed is a bit of an understatement.
The DOJ calculated Louisiana’s Black voter turnout as a proportion of the total Black population over the age of 18, and did the same for white voter turnout. However, that latter group—the denominator of the statistic, if you want to get fancy—includes people who can’t vote, like non-citizens or people with felony convictions.
People who actually do statistics understand this doesn’t work, as it compares two different groups of people. The first is composed of people who can vote and do, and the latter is composed of people who can vote and do not, AND people who cannot vote at all. Normally, the denominator would instead be something like all eligible voters.
When The Guardian analyzed the numbers in the DOJ brief, they found that Black voter turnout genuinely exceeded white turnout only in 2012.
This likely wasn’t an error by the DOJ borne out of incompetence, but rather malice and mucking about with turnout demographics.
“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,” said voter turnout expert Michael McDonald. “Someone knew what they were doing.”
When asked for comment, the DOJ confirmed its methodology but wouldn’t say anything more, and, of course, the Supreme Court isn’t talking, so suck it. You’ll take the gutting of the VRA and like it.
Part of why Alito and his pals are so susceptible to this sort of thing is that they are too arrogant to know what they don’t know and too willing to recycle any conservative claptrap that confirms their prior beliefs.
That’s what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson, where Alito fashioned himself a historian, spelunking back through time, picking up bits here and there, and smashing them together incorrectly so that he could gut abortion rights.
But sometimes, it’s just lies. Like Justice Neil Gorsuch lying about the praying football coach in Bremerton v Kennedy, framing him as just a widdle guy doing a nice quiet prayer after a tough game when literal pictures show him leading a giant crowd, including his players, in prayer from the 50-yard line. But hey, you gotta lie to figure out a way to force evangelical Christian prayer on public schools and pretend it is What The Founders Wanted.
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There’s also the conservative Christian website designer who got her whole case before the Supreme Court based on her assertion that she had been asked to make a same-sex wedding website and therefore had to race to get a Colorado law mandating basic civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people thrown out. But there was never a request, nor had she ever built any wedding websites.
The GOP appointees on the court care as little about facts as they do about the law. They know their real job is to deliver results for conservatives, and they’re happy to do whatever they can to help.
