Voters can’t sue for disability discrimination, court rules

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that private citizens have no standing to sue for disability-based violations of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—the landmark federal legislation which protects, among other things, the right to voting assistance for disabled people and voters with low English literacy. The Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction covers Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—meaning voters in those states will no longer have any direct remedy when those rights are violated.

All but one of the Eighth Circuit’s 11 judges were appointed under Republican administrations, including four Trump appointees from the president’s first term; any appeal by Arkansas United, the pro–voting rights nonprofit that brought the case, could set up the similarly conservative Supreme Court to extend the ruling to cover the country as a whole. (Some conservative justices have had surprising records on disability rights—but the Roberts Court is also infamously the bench that gutted the VRA.)

Only state attorneys general themselves, the court’s ruling holds, can act to enforce the Voting Rights Act and prevent violations—not, in the case of states with notoriously poor voting rights records, very likely. Within the Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction, state governments in Missouri, Arkansas, Nebraska, and Iowa have all enacted party-line voter suppression laws in recent years—governments that voters facing VRA discrimination would now have to rely on for enforcement.

“Based on the text and structure of the VRA, Congress did not give private plaintiffs the ability to sue,” the judgment reads in part.

Arkansas United, the group that brought the case forward, is a nonprofit mainly known for working with immigrants in the state—an illustration of the flexibility, breadth, and significance of the Voting Rights Act, which intertwines protections for immigrants and second-language English speakers with those it provides to disabled voters.

In 2009, Arkansas passed a law limiting to six the number of individuals that one person, other than poll workers, could legally assist to vote. In August 2022, a court granted a summary judgment to Arkansas United getting rid of the six-person limit—but the next month, the Eighth Circuit of Appeals granted an emergency motion to allow the law to continue. The July 28 decision by the Eighth Circuit reversed the summary judgment for Arkansas United and sent the case back to the district court for further action, according to Democracy Docket.

As I previously reported for Mother Jones, most ballot measures are written at a graduate-school reading level—and, except in North Dakota and New York, not in plain language. It can be notoriously challenging for anyone to follow exactly what some ballot measures propose; that’s even more the case for some disabled people and voters with limited English proficiency.

Arkansas isn’t the only state that has tried to limit voter assistance: Last September, a district judge overturned a law in Alabama that made it a felony to assist people in requesting and voting with absentee ballots.

Nor is this the Eighth Circuit’s only recent attack on the Voting Rights Act: the court held in May that people of color cannot sue individually under VRA provisions against racial discrimination, a holding temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court last Thursday in a 6-3 decision, with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting.

Correction, July 28: This post has been updated to reflect the scope of the Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction.