Brace yourself:
I agree with the decision. It was the right call.
First off, democrats are being just as bad if not worse than republicans when it comes to yelling "voter fraud", "voter suppression" or "voter restrictions". Arizona's two laws are very, very simple:
- If you vote, you need to vote in your precinct, not somebody else's.
- If you need to have someone deposit your mail-in ballot, it should be someone you know.
That's it. That's their laws.
Democrats claimed that those two laws adversely effect black people. How? They couldn't prove that, so the court ruled against them. It's that simple.
Ballot harvesting is problematic for two reasons:
- You don't know who is actually behind the company that's picking up your ballots, so you have no idea what is done with them or to them before they're delivered.
- You have no way of really knowing if your ballot you gave them was ever really delivered at all.
So imagine a scenario where a person that is a democrat sets up a ballot harvesting company, mails out a bunch of flyers to republican neighborhoods offering their service, goes out and picks up thousands of ballots and then simply burns them.
That can happen.
What Arizona is saying is they have no problem if you need someone to take your ballot to the post office or drop box. They just want it to be your neighbor, or the nephew that lives down the street, or a person from your church, just not some ballot harvesting company you don't know from Adam's housecat.
The other scenario is precinct voting. When you vote out of precinct you cause a lot of problems. Most importantly, depending on your state you may have different options on who you're actually voting for. (That's true here and in Arizona and many other states.)
Example: When I go to my voting center I don't have the option to vote on the congressman for the 15th district (Marjorie Taylor Green's district), I can only vote for the representative of the 7th district. But were I to drive up to Rome, Georgia, the ballot wouldn't have my representative on it, it would have the 15th district's representatives on it to vote for.
In essence, voting out of district has people on the ballot you're not even eligible to vote for, so during voter tallies they have to make sure that everybody votes in district and then remove all of the votes that aren't eligible while keeping the others.
Arizona is sick of sorting it out. You vote out of district, you're entire ballot is removed. It's that simple.
These are not "voter suppression" laws. This is common sense. If you can't be bothered to vote where you're supposed to for the people you're entitled to vote for, or you're too lazy to walk to your mail box or get your neighbor to drop your ballot off for you, then obviously voting is not something you're terribly interested in doing.
Either that, or you're up to committing voter fraud yourself.
As for packing the court, really, really bad idea. The only thing that will do is set the precedent for the GOP to expand it even further when they regain power, which they will. It's not a cure to a problem at all. It would in fact create an entirely new one.
It's the same reason democrats wont get rid of the filibuster. If you do, you render yourself powerless when you're in the minority, which dems probably will be a year from now.