1. SCOTUS wraps up 2019-2020 term
2. Massachusetts voters to decide on ranked-choice voting in November
3. Local roundup

SCOTUS wraps up 2019-2020 term

The U.S. Supreme Court has ended its 2019-2020 term and is now in recess until the start of the 2020-2021 term on October 5. 

Delays from the coronavirus pandemic caused the court to release opinions until July 9. This was the first time the court issued opinions into July since 1996. The July 9 date set a record for the latest date the court has issued regular opinions since 1960. Before that, the latest date for issuing opinions in that span was July 7, 1986.

The court agreed to hear 74 cases this term. Twelve cases were postponed to the 2020-2021 term, due to the coronavirus pandemic. The court accepted to hear the most cases from the 2nd and the 9th Circuits (nine each).

Join us as we review the most important aspects of the Supreme Court's 2019-2020 term in our upcoming webinar! Click here to register for the briefing to learn more about the coronavirus pandemic's impact, the decision trends we're seeing, and the latest data on reversal rates. 

Below is a sneak peek of some of the data points we’ll be discussing in the webinar.

Opinions

• The court issued 53 signed opinions this term. Justice Roberts and Gorsuch wrote the most opinions with seven each. Justices Thomas, Breyer, and Sotomayor wrote the least, with five opinions each. 

5-4 decisions

• The court issued 13 total 5-4 or 5-3 decisions—21% of the total opinions released this term.

• Across these decisions, 69% had a majority made up of all five conservative justices (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh). The rest had a majority made up of the four liberal justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan) and one conservative justice.

• Since the 2005-2006 term, the court released the highest percentage of  5-4 opinions in 2006, at 33%. It issued the least amount of 5-4 opinions in 2015, at 5%.

Reversal rates

• SCOTUS reversed 45 lower court decisions (67.2%) and affirmed 22. 

• This term's reversal rate was 2.9 percentage points lower than the average rate of reversal since 2007 (70.1%).

• Between the 2007 and 2019 terms, SCOTUS released opinions in 991 cases. Of those, it reversed a lower court decision 695 times (70.1%) while affirming a lower court decision 288 times (29.1%).

Learn more

       

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Massachusetts voters to decide on ranked-choice voting in November

Massachusetts voters will decide whether to adopt ranked-choice voting (RCV) this November. On July 10, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin (D) announced the Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative had been certified for the ballot.

The initiative would enact RCV for primary and general elections for state executive officials, state legislators, federal congressional and senate seats, and certain county offices beginning in 2022. 

RCV is a voting method in which voters rank candidates according to their preferences. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote after the first round of tallying, the last-place candidate is eliminated from the running, and the votes of those who chose that candidate as their first choice are redistributed to those voters' second-choice candidates. The process continues until a candidate wins a simple majority. For a video further explaining the process, click here.

Currently, Maine is the only state to use RCV for state-level elections. Maine voters approved a ranked-choice voting initiative in 2016 with 52.12% of the vote. In Massachusetts, Cambridge is the only jurisdiction in the state that has used the voting system. Amherst and Easthampton have adopted the system and are working on implementing it.

An RCV initiative is also certified to appear on the Alaska ballot this year. Proponents of RCV initiatives in Arkansas and North Dakota submitted signatures in early July to qualify their measures for the November ballot.

New York City was the last jurisdiction to consider an RCV ballot measure in 2019. New York City Ballot Question 1 was approved by 73.61% of voters and enacted RCV for primary and special elections for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president, and city council members beginning in 2021. No statewide RCV ballot measures have ever been defeated.

One other measure will be on the Massachusetts ballot in November: the Massachusetts “Right to Repair” Initiative. Certified on July 10, it would expand access to telematics systems for vehicle owners and independent repair shops. 

Between 1996 and 2018, an average of three measures appeared on the ballot in Massachusetts during even-numbered election years. A total of 39 measures appeared during that period, with 54% of the measures approved.

Local roundup

Here’s our weekly rundown of local election results.

On Tuesday, Fort Worth voters approved a special sales tax renewal to fund the Crime and Prevention District 64% to 36%. 

Fort Worth voters have renewed the Crime Control and Prevention District sales tax four previous times with approval of more than 75% of voters. The last vote on the tax was in 2014. For fiscal year 2019, the 0.5% sales tax generated $78 million in revenue.

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