{"id":150803,"date":"2026-05-08T13:39:49","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T21:39:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/08\/sam-alito-put-fake-facts-in-a-supreme-court-opinion\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T13:39:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T21:39:49","slug":"sam-alito-put-fake-facts-in-a-supreme-court-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/08\/sam-alito-put-fake-facts-in-a-supreme-court-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Alito Put Fake Facts In A Supreme Court Opinion!?!?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his opinion functionally striking down the Voting Rights Act, Justice Sam Alito included fake data<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In any functional justice system, this disqualifying act of judicial irresponsibility would shock the nation\u2019s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn\u2019t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would register as an all-timer scandal. But it\u2019s America in 2026, so it barely registers more than a \u201csure.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an exclusive report<\/a>, The Guardian<\/em> identified false data included in the Alito authored majority opinion in Callais v. Louisiana<\/em>. The factual claim, that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, comes \u201calmost verbatim\u201d from an amicus brief<\/a>\u00a0filed by the Trump Department of Justice. Alito cited this data to support the premise that the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary.<\/p>\n

Are you sitting down? Because this is shocking: the same Department of Justice repeatedly<\/a> caught lying to courts<\/a>\u2026 lied to the Court!<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

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\u00a0<\/strong>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\u00a0not preferred<\/a>\u00a0by 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\u2019s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016\u00a0<\/strong>presidential elections in Louisiana.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One would hope this speaks to why Alito delivered such an unhinged response<\/a> when Justice Jackson baited him into acknowledging that the Callais<\/em> opinion was reverse engineered. That somehow her needling got to Alito because he realized he\u2019d uncritically parroted false data in an opinion. Sadly, that probably had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it\u2019s unlikely that Alito and company will even consider the gravity of enshrining lies into the nation\u2019s constitutional legacy.<\/p>\n

Hey, let\u2019s give Alito the benefit of the doubt\u2026 he probably figured it out it was false and included it anyway. It\u2019s certainly not the first time the Court\u2019s conservatives have embraced falsehood<\/a> in order to get the outcome they desire.<\/p>\n

\n

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\u00a0Louisiana<\/a>\u00a0using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While conservative apologists will try to split hairs and argue that that this is a misleading mistake as opposed to false, The Guardian<\/em> brought in one of the country\u2019s leading experts to analyze the data. The University of Florida\u2019s Michael McDonald concluded: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey had to fudge how they\u2019re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they\u2019re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone knew what they were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Someone<\/em> knew what they were doing. That\u2019s a lot nicer than everyone involved<\/em> knew what they were doing.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it pretty to think so.<\/p>\n

Samuel Alito\u2019s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ<\/a> [The Guardian]
Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act<\/a> [The New Republic]<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: Ketanji Brown Jackson Sends Sam Alito Raging<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Sam Alito Put Fake Facts In A Supreme Court Opinion!?!?<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t (Photo by Alex Wong\/Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his opinion functionally striking down the Voting Rights Act, Justice Sam Alito included fake data<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In any functional justice system, this disqualifying act of judicial irresponsibility would shock the nation\u2019s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn\u2019t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would register as an all-timer scandal. But it\u2019s America in 2026, so it barely registers more than a \u201csure.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an exclusive report<\/a>, The Guardian<\/em> identified false data included in the Alito authored majority opinion in Callais v. Louisiana<\/em>. The factual claim, that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, comes \u201calmost verbatim\u201d from an amicus brief<\/a>\u00a0filed by the Trump Department of Justice. Alito cited this data to support the premise that the Voting Rights Act was unnecessary.<\/p>\n

Are you sitting down? Because this is shocking: the same Department of Justice repeatedly<\/a> caught lying to courts<\/a>\u2026 lied to the Court!<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

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\u00a0not preferred<\/a>\u00a0by 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\u2019s conclusion that Black voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 and 2016presidential elections in Louisiana.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One would hope this speaks to why Alito delivered such an unhinged response<\/a> when Justice Jackson baited him into acknowledging that the Callais<\/em> opinion was reverse engineered. That somehow her needling got to Alito because he realized he\u2019d uncritically parroted false data in an opinion. Sadly, that probably had nothing to do with it. Indeed, it\u2019s unlikely that Alito and company will even consider the gravity of enshrining lies into the nation\u2019s constitutional legacy.<\/p>\n

Hey, let\u2019s give Alito the benefit of the doubt\u2026 he probably figured it out it was false and included it anyway. It\u2019s certainly not the first time the Court\u2019s conservatives have embraced falsehood<\/a> in order to get the outcome they desire.<\/p>\n

\n

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\u00a0Louisiana<\/a>\u00a0using the citizen voting age population, it found that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While conservative apologists will try to split hairs and argue that that this is a misleading mistake as opposed to false, The Guardian<\/em> brought in one of the country\u2019s leading experts to analyze the data. The University of Florida\u2019s Michael McDonald concluded: <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey had to fudge how they\u2019re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they\u2019re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone knew what they were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Someone<\/em> knew what they were doing. That\u2019s a lot nicer than everyone involved<\/em> knew what they were doing.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t it pretty to think so.<\/p>\n

Samuel Alito\u2019s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ<\/a> [The Guardian]
Samuel Alito Cited Fudged Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act<\/a> [The New Republic]<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: Ketanji Brown Jackson Sends Sam Alito Raging<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s conscience. Realizing that a majority of the Supreme Court couldn\u2019t be bothered to conduct superficial fact-checking before signing their names to the opinion would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":150804,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Headshot-300x200-zr1fcU.jpg?fit=300%2C200&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}