In his opinion functionally striking down the Voting Rights Act, Justice Sam Alito included fake data.
In any functional justice system, this disqualifying act of judicial irresponsibility would shock the nation’s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn’t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would register as an all-timer scandal. But it’s America in 2026, so it barely registers more than a “sure.”
In an exclusive report, The Guardian identified false data included in the Alito authored majority opinion in Callais v. Louisiana. The factual claim, that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, comes “almost verbatim” from an amicus brief filed by the Trump Department of Justice. Alito cited this data to support the premise that the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary.
Are you sitting down? Because this is shocking: the same Department of Justice repeatedly caught lying to courts… lied to the Court!
But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito cited calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Louisiana.
One would hope this speaks to why Alito delivered such an unhinged response when Justice Jackson baited him into acknowledging that the Callais opinion was reverse engineered. That somehow her needling got to Alito because he realized he’d uncritically parroted false data in an opinion. Sadly, that probably had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it’s unlikely that Alito and company will even consider the gravity of enshrining lies into the nation’s constitutional legacy.
Hey, let’s give Alito the benefit of the doubt… he probably figured it out it was false and included it anyway. It’s certainly not the first time the Court’s conservatives have embraced falsehood in order to get the outcome they desire.
The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.
While conservative apologists will try to split hairs and argue that that this is a misleading mistake as opposed to false, The Guardian brought in one of the country’s leading experts to analyze the data. The University of Florida’s Michael McDonald concluded:
“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”
Someone knew what they were doing. That’s a lot nicer than everyone involved knew what they were doing.
Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Samuel Alito’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ [The Guardian]
Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act [The New Republic]
Earlier: Ketanji Brown Jackson Sends Sam Alito Raging
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
The post Sam Alito Put Fake Facts In A Supreme Court Opinion!?!? appeared first on Above the Law.
In his opinion functionally striking down the Voting Rights Act, Justice Sam Alito included fake data.
In any functional justice system, this disqualifying act of judicial irresponsibility would shock the nation’s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn’t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would register as an all-timer scandal. But it’s America in 2026, so it barely registers more than a “sure.”
In an exclusive report, The Guardian identified false data included in the Alito authored majority opinion in Callais v. Louisiana. The factual claim, that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, comes “almost verbatim” from an amicus brief filed by the Trump Department of Justice. Alito cited this data to support the premise that the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary.
Are you sitting down? Because this is shocking: the same Department of Justice repeatedly caught lying to courts… lied to the Court!
But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology. The justice department brief that Alito citedcalculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. Such an approach is not preferred by experts in calculating statewide turnout because the general over-18 population may include non-citizens, people with felony convictions and others who cannot legally vote. But it does yield Alito’s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016presidential elections in Louisiana.
One would hope this speaks to why Alito delivered such an unhinged response when Justice Jackson baited him into acknowledging that the Callais opinion was reverse engineered. That somehow her needling got to Alito because he realized he’d uncritically parroted false data in an opinion. Sadly, that probably had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it’s unlikely that Alito and company will even consider the gravity of enshrining lies into the nation’s constitutional legacy.
Hey, let’s give Alito the benefit of the doubt… he probably figured it out it was false and included it anyway. It’s certainly not the first time the Court’s conservatives have embraced falsehood in order to get the outcome they desire.
The widely accepted approach is to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population or the voter eligible population, the latter of which excludes non-citizens as well as people who cannot vote because of a felony conviction or because they have been deemed mentally incapacitated. When the Guardian analyzed turnout numbers in Louisiana using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.
While conservative apologists will try to split hairs and argue that that this is a misleading mistake as opposed to false, The Guardian brought in one of the country’s leading experts to analyze the data. The University of Florida’s Michael McDonald concluded:
“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”
Someone knew what they were doing. That’s a lot nicer than everyone involved knew what they were doing.
Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Samuel Alito’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ [The Guardian]
Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act [The New Republic]
Earlier: Ketanji Brown Jackson Sends Sam Alito Raging
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
