2020 Elections & The Supreme Court: Voting Rights
The Supreme Court had more work than usual dealing with elections in 2020 than it does in normal years. With the ongoing pandemic, many groups sought help in federal court to force states to make changes to voting procedures. Generally the Supreme Court rejected these requests. At the same time, other groups challenged voting procedure changes in several states. The Supreme Court allowed some of these changes to go forward, but rejected others.
With the decennial census occurring in 2020, the court also dealt with several cases involving the census. In June, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question to the census. It later decided the census must be completed by October 31, 2020 even with the ongoing pandemic making it harder to gather responses. Finally, the Supreme Court punted on deciding whether the Trump administration could exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count.
Instructors, click the link below to download this week’s lecture for use in your classroom. The deck contains a writing prompt and a debate question as well as other assessment questions.
Download the PowerPoint Lecture Spark for “The Supreme Court"
Links
“A More Liberal Supreme Court? Not When It Comes to Voting Rights”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/supreme-court-voting-rights.html
“A 5-4 Supreme Court Threatened Voting Rights. A 6-3 Could Finish Them Off”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/24/trump-roberts-supreme-court-conservative-majority/
“How The Supreme Court Could Affect Voting Rules on Election Day”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/supreme-court-voting-rules.html
“Trump’s Census Citizenship Fiasco, Explained”
https://www.vox.com/2019/7/11/20689015/census-citizenship-question-trump-executive-order
“Trumps Bid to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants from Reapportionment Arrives at Supreme Court”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-census-undocumented-immigrants-reapportionment-/2020/11/28/be238a3c-30d0-11eb-96c2-aac3f162215d_story.html
“Census Bureau Spends Millions on Ads Combating Citizenship Question Scare”
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/18/census-bureau-ads-citizenship-question-115718
Assessment
- Debate: Should the Supreme Court have ordered states to adopt changes to make voting easier during the pandemic?
- Should the Supreme Court allow the Trump Administration to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census?
- Poll: Should federal courts be able to order states to implement changes to voting?
- Short Answer: What did the Supreme Court do about the Trump administration’s request to add a citizenship question to the census?
Enjoy using Lecture Spark? Answer this 5-question survey to help us innovate!
Featured Image Credit: Geoff Livingston
