Does The Constitution Protect Your Right To Vote? It May Depend On Your Address.

The Supreme Court no longer has a conservative majority, and that could significantly change the way the 2016 election plays out.
Elections are not simply fought out at the polls. They are also fought in state legislatures. Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise groups that are likely to prefer Democrats to Republicans. Changes to voter registration rules and rules regarding which ballots are discarded can subtly shift the electorate to the right. In Florida, one Republican consultant admitted that state lawmakers eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day “because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves” to bring voters to the polls.
And, after legislators enact laws that could change who actually gets to cast a ballot, elections are fought in courts as well. Before Justice Antonin Scalia’s death earlier this month, the Roberts Court greenlighted voter ID laws and gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. During the 2014 election cycle, the Supreme Court also blocked several lower court orders halting changes to state voting law which were handed down close to the election. Notably most (although not all) of these lower court decisions would have protected voting rights if they had not been suspended by the Supreme Court.
This election, however, there will not be a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Indeed, unless President Obama finds a way to break through Senate Republican’s planned blockade of his Supreme Court nominee, it’s unlikely that the Court will have any majority at all in many politically charged cases.
As election law expert Rick Hasen notes, there is already one early sign that Scalia’s death has moved the Court’s center of gravity in voting rights cases. After a lower federal court held that two of North Carolina’s congressional districts are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, many experts (including Hasen) expected the Supreme Court to stay this decision. It didn’t.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/02/29/3754623/does-the-constitution-protect-your-right-to-vote-it-may-depend-on-your-address/