The Supreme Court on Monday declined to review challenges to Texas’s ban on paid voter assistance, leaving in place a 5th Circuit ruling that upheld the restrictions and dealing a setback to civil rights advocates fighting the Texas paid voter assistance ban.
The decision means that Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act, which guarantees that voters who need help due to blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may receive assistance from a person of their choice, will not be enforced against Texas’s law criminalizing compensation for such help. The provision explicitly protects who may assist voters but does not address whether those assistants may be paid, leaving that question to state regulation, according to the state’s arguments that the Supreme Court declined to revisit.
Texas adopted Senate Bill 1 in 2021, a sweeping election law that made it a felony to compensate someone or receive compensation for assisting a voter with a mail-in ballot. Civil rights and voting rights organizations, including La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), OCA-Greater Houston, and others, sued to challenge the ban, arguing it made voting harder for people of color, voters with disabilities, and voters with limited English proficiency who often rely on trained, paid staff for assistance.
A federal district judge in the Western District of Texas initially ruled the ban was preempted by Section 208. However, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, upholding the restriction. The organizations then asked the Supreme Court to review the case, but the justices declined to take it up.
LUPE, a nonprofit social services organization, had argued it was forced to turn away members seeking help completing mail-in ballots out of fear of prosecution. The state attorney general’s office, led by Ken Paxton, countered that Section 208 protects who may assist but not whether they may be paid. “Petitioners ask this Court to hold that Congress, by enacting a one-sentence provision permitting voters to obtain assistance from a person of their choice rather than a person selected for them by the government, silently stripped every State of authority to regulate the financial conditions under which third parties provide mail-in-voter assistance,” Paxton and others wrote to the Supreme Court. “That is not what Section 208 says or does.”
The decision comes weeks after the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s majority-Black congressional district in April 2026, a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines that weakened the scope of the Voting Rights Act. In late June, the Court also declined to hear a similar Arkansas case challenging a law that criminalizes helping more than six voters cast ballots, leaving in place an 8th Circuit ruling that only the Department of Justice — and not voters or private organizations — had the right to sue under Section 208.
Sources
- The Hill — Supreme Court’s decline to review Texas voter assistance ban, details on Section 208, Senate Bill 1, civil rights groups’ arguments, and state attorney general’s position
- Democracy Docket — Supreme Court’s decision not to take up challenge, impact on voters with disabilities, details on district court and 5th Circuit rulings, Arkansas precedent
