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Thanks to this exhaustive consideration, Viviano found himself with little choice but to dissent from the majority’s opinion on the case at hand: one allowing a constitutional amendment on access to abortion to appear on the November ballot. The amendment had been blocked by a state board ostensibly because some of the text of the amendment appeared on petitions without visible spaces, sortoflikethis.

In a footnote, Justice Richard Bernstein, who voted with the majority, disagreed with arguments like Viviano’s.

“As a blind person who is also a wordsmith and a member of this Court,” he wrote, “I find it unremarkable to note that the lack of visual spacing has never mattered much to me.”

The fact that Bernstein dismissed the spaces-between-letters argument in a footnote, and that Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack spent very little time on it in her majority opinion, reflects an understandable view of why so much attention was paid to the spacing in the first place: It wasn’t about ensuring comprehension of the proposed amendment but, instead, about blocking it from the ballot by any means necessary.