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The Supreme Court declined on Monday to review a pair of challenges to Texas’s ban on paid voter assistance, leaving in place an appeals court ruling that upheld the restrictions.
The decision is a setback for civil rights and voting rights groups, which argued the state law undermines a section of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) that establishes protections for voters who may require assistance with casting a ballot.
Section 208 guarantees that any voters who need help due to blindness, disability or the inability to read or write may receive assistance by a “person of the voter’s choice,” excluding certain individuals such as employers, supervisors and union officers.
Texas in 2021 adopted Senate Bill 1, a measure that included a provision making it a felony crime to compensate someone or receive compensation for assisting a voter with a mail-in ballot.
The law was promptly challenged in separate lawsuits by La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) and other civil rights and voting rights nonprofit organizations, including OCA-Greater Houston.
The plaintiffs contended that Texas’ ban makes it more difficult for voters of color, voter with disabilities, and voters with limited English proficiency to cast ballots because many of them rely on trained, paid staff for assistance.
LUPE, a nonprofit social services organization, also argued that the group has been forced to turn away members who seek help completing their mail in ballots due to fear of prosecution.
The state attorney general’s office, led by attorney general Ken Paxton (R), countered that Section 208 protects who may assist but not whether they may be paid, the latter of which falls under the state’s authority to regulate how elections are administered.
“Petitioners ask this Court to hold that Congress, by enacting a one-sentence provision permitting voters to obtain assistance from a person of their choice rather than a person selected for them by the government, silently stripped every State of authority to regulate the financial conditions under which third parties provide mail-in-voter assistance,” Paxton and others wrote to the Supreme Court. “That is not what Section 208 says or does.”
A federal judge in the Western District of Texas found that the Texas ban was preempted by the VRA, ruling that it could not be enforced.
The Texas attorney general’s office appealed, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed.
Monday’s announcement comes after the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander earlier this year in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines that weakened the scope of the VRA.
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