The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Ginsburg, and joined by every Justice except Justices Stevens and Souter, answers both of these questions in the negative. The invalidated 1985 law, the Court holds, never gained “force or effect” for Section 5 purposes, and so the State’s reversion to its prior practice of gubernatorial appointment did not rank as a “change” requiring preclearance. Underlying the Court’s opinion is an overwhelming respect for the judgment by “Alabama’s highest court” declaring the 1985 Act and its special election procedure invalid under the Alabama State Constitution, and a conscious effort to limit the ruling to the peculiar facts of this case.

So, at first blush, the Court’s opinion does not seem so terribly ominous. After all, the way the Court paints the picture, the facts of Riley seem to fall at the outer-boundaries of Section 5's reach. Until, that is, one reads Justice Stevens’ dissent. The dissent makes clear that the way the Court paints the picture is itself worrisome. Leaving aside arguments over the proper application of relevant precedents, the Court ignores two powerful canons of statutory construction that point decidedly in favor of requiring preclearance in this case. First, it neglects the substantive canon (background norm) favoring liberal construction of Section 5 of the VRA (See Allen v. State Board of Elections, noting Congress’ intent to give Section 5 the “broadest possible scope,” reaching “any state enactment which altered the election law of a covered State in even a minor way”).

Second, the Court ignores the fact that election law changes worked by state courts fall squarely within the “Mischief” that the VRA was designed to correct. Although Justice Stevens does not explicitly reference the Hart and Sacks “Mischief Rule” in his dissent, it is very much a mischief argument that he is making when he insists that deference to state courts is improper in construing the VRA, because discrimination against minority voters by state courts was part of the “history of voting practices” that the VRA originally was designed to remedy. In fact, Justice Stevens’ dissent provides a classic mischief-style history lesson in the state of affairs that led to enactment of the VRA — recounting how the Alabama Supreme Court not only (1) imposed procedural obstacles in the way of minority litigants seeking to challenge local election officials’ discriminatory registration procedures, but (2) drafted and promulgated a complex registration questionnaire designed to block the registration of African-American voters. Justice Stevens’ history lesson shows that “prior to the VRA, the Alabama Supreme Court worked hand-in-hand with the Alabama Legislature to erect obstacles to African-American voting,” and makes clear that deference to state courts in covered jurisdictions thus is as out of step with Section 5 as is deference to state election boards or legislatures. In other words, the scenario at issue in Riley falls much closer to the core of Section 5 than the majority would have us think.

Why, then, this collective amnesia on the part of seven members of the Roberts Court? Well, the fear behind election law experts’ lamentations is that it is not so much amnesia that is at work, but rather a deliberate conclusion by a majority of the Justices that the original mischief the VRA was designed to remedy no longer is relevant in construing the scope of Section 5. Justice Stevens’ dissent tellingly notes that he “do[es] not mean to cast aspersions on the current members of the Alabama Supreme Court”—i.e., he does not mean to suggest that their invalidation of the 1985 law was motivated by a desire to disfranchise minority voters. Under traditional principles of statutory construction (and VRA construction in particular), he does not need to suggest anything of the kind; the Alabama Supreme Court’s history of discriminating against minority voters is enough to relieve it of any entitelement to deference from federal courts and to bring election law changes worked by its decisions within Section 5’s preclearance regime. The fact that seven members of the Court completely ignore this principle suggests that they believe the original impetus behind Section 5 (the mischief Congress sought to correct) does not matter going forward — it is almost as if the majority is engaging in a “dynamic updating” of the VRA, taking current conditions, rather than time-of-enactment conditions, into account. And if that is the case, then election law experts are correct to worry about the future of Section 5 and its preclearance mechanism (particularly given that the findings upon which Congress based its 2006 renewal of the VRA harken back to data from 1964).