Only 41 percent of registered voters went to the polls in Ohio’s 2014 general elections; the following year, just 43 percent voted. In the face of these abysmal rates, state officials should be focused on engaging the electorate and improving participation. But Ohio instead treats a failure to vote over such a two-year period as sufficient reason to trigger the process of removing someone from the voter rolls entirely. And on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that doing so was perfectly legal. Registered voters in the state who have not cast a ballot over two years are — and will continue to be — sent a notice by the local election board to confirm their registration. If they do not respond to the notice, and if they do not engage the electoral process over the following four years, they are purged from the voter registration lists. This process occasions the removal of thousands of voters — 40,000 in 2015 just in Cuyahoga County (Ohio’s largest, which includes the city of Cleveland) — many of whom are otherwise eligible to vote. (The Associated Press, for instance, recently profiled a man who returned from Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan to find out that he had been removed from the voter rolls.) Ohio has adopted exceptionally low standards for how and when it determines that a voter is ineligible, and this has led to stark and discriminatory patterns of voter suppression. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court vindicated the arguments of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who has argued that this practice serves to ensure a necessary housekeeping of voter rolls. Husted’s goals sound reasonable enough in a vacuum, but the issue here is not over the abstract idea of removing voters the state knows to be ineligible or deceased. Ohio has adopted exceptionally low standards for how and when it determines that a voter is ineligible, and this has led to stark and discriminatory patterns of voter suppression. Ohio’s purging practices disproportionately affect lower-income or minority households, which are less likely to vote regularly. Early voters use electronic ballot casting machines at the Franklin County Board of Elections, in Columbus, Ohio on Nov. 7, 2016. John Minchillo / AP file A Reuters analysis of Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati, found that 10 percent of registered voters were purged in heavily African-American areas compared to 4 percent in a predominantly white suburb. Across the three state’s three largest countries, Reuters found that "voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods;" the former are likely to have larger minority population and higher shares of poor residents. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor linked Ohio's purging practices to the "concerted state efforts” throughout American history to “disenfranchise low-income and minority voters." The majority ruling, Sotomayor charged, "entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority voters and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate." Besides which, given the terribly low turnout in U.S. elections it is grossly excessive to presume that someone’s failure to vote is indicative that they no longer reside at the address at which they are registered. Asking people to return a confirmation notice does not remedy this situation. Given the terribly low turnout in U.S. elections it is grossly excessive to presume that someone’s failure to vote is indicative that they no longer reside at the address at which they are registered. In 2012, Ohio sent out 1.5 million such notices (the state had about 8 million registered voters at the time); 1 million were left unanswered. "If those 1 million or so registered voters (or even half of them) had, in fact, moved, then vastly more people must move each year in Ohio than is generally true of the roughly 4% of all Americans who move to a different county nationwide," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote with sarcasm in his dissenting opinion today. "A nonreturned confirmation notice (as the numbers show) cannot reasonably indicate a change of address." Further, local boards employ greatly varying degrees of caution in deciding whether to purge voters, meaning that the likelihood of being purged for failure to vote is a matter of location. "We really don’t want a person’s ability to vote to be determined by the luck of where they live," Freda Levenson of the Ohio ACLU told FiveThirtyEight. What’s at stake in the aggressive quality of Ohio’s purging practices, is not combatting imaginary networks of voter fraud — Ohio, like most states pursuing practices that make it more difficult to vote, has never had any evidence of widespread or coordinated attempts to commit such acts — but a pernicious vision of what constitutes "civic competence" and who Republicans think has earned the right to vote. What’s at stake in the aggressive quality of Ohio’s purging practices, is not combatting imaginary networks of voter fraud but a pernicious vision of what constitutes "civic competence." "If this is really important thing to you in our life, voting, you probably would have done so within a six-year period," Husted said to defend his approach to purging registered voters. Here he is making no pretense that the mass purging of voters is valuable as a way to identify voters who have become ineligible; what is left is the dangerous underlying assumption that there is value to filtering out voters who will not jump through arbitrary and unevenly burdensome hoops, the idea being that the civic disinterest that their behavior allegedly signals marks them as unfit for participation in political life. Resisting this assumption means championing laws and practices that aim to significantly ease the burdens to voting and of registering to vote. A growing number of states have been adopting automatic voter registration laws and Election Day registration laws; Ohio has neither. Today’s ruling only increases the urgency that it and other states adopt them.<doc-sep>(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Ohio’s method of removing names from its voter rolls does not violate federal law. The decision was 5-4. Monday’s ruling concerning the battleground state comes as the country gears up for midterm elections this fall. At least six other states have similar laws, and the ruling could embolden others to follow suit and enact what critics say are aggressive purges of voter rolls. Ohio law allows the state to send address confirmation notices to voters who have not engaged in voter activity for two years. If a voter returns the notice through prepaid mail, or responds online, the information is updated. If the notice is ignored and the voter fails to update a registration over the next four years, the registration is canceled. “We have no authority to second-guess Congress or to decide whether Ohio’s supplemental process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the conservative majority. “The only question before us is whether it violates federal law.” Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said the ruling is a “validation” of the state’s law. “Today’s decision is a victory for election integrity, and a defeat for those who use the federal court system to make election law across the country,” Husted said in a statement. “This decision is validation of Ohio’s efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now with the blessing nation’s highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to use.” A dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor and liberal justices argued that the court ignored a history of voter suppression that the National Voter Registration Act, commonly referred to as the motor voter law, was meant to address. “Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by states to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text … ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against,” she added. “The Supreme Court has just given a stamp of approval to voter suppression,” said Liz Kennedy, senior director of Democracy and Government Reform at the Center for American Progress. “Ohio’s system of purging voters that choose not to participate in some elections unfairly silences hundreds of thousands of voters in the state, especially people of color and the homeless.” Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said other states could follow Ohio’s lead. “Today’s decision could provide a road map to other states to follow Ohio’s lead and to adopt aggressive rules for culling their voter rolls going forward, even with respect to folks who are still living in Ohio and legally eligible to vote,” Vladeck said. Dale Ho, director of Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the vast majority of other states find ways to make sure voter lists are up to date by using tax records, or returned mail or Department of Motor Vehicles change of address forms to determine whether someone may have moved. The case came about when Larry Harmon challenged the process arguing that he was removed from the rolls even though he had not moved, but rather had opted not to vote in 2009 and 2010. When he showed up at the polls in 2015 he was told his registration had been canceled. He claimed no recollection of receiving a confirmation notice from the state and he later brought suit along with two public interest groups called the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. In September 2016, a federal appeals court ruled against Ohio, saying that 7,515 ballots that had been struck could be cast in the that fall’s election. The state appealed, saying the process targets people who have failed to respond to a notice, not those who have failed to vote. Alito emphasized the ruling was based on whether or not Ohio’s process violated federal law, not if it was good policy or not. “What matters for present purposes is not whether the Ohio Legislature overestimated the correlation between nonvoting and moving or whether it reached a wise policy judgment about when return cards should be sent,” he wrote. The Trump administration, reversing positions from the Obama administration, agreed with Ohio’s interpretation of the federal law. The “NVRA does not prohibit a state from using nonvoting” as the basis of sending an address-verification notice, administration lawyers argued in court briefs.<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON — In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Ohio a victory Monday in a fight over the state's method for removing people from the voter rolls, a practice that civil rights groups said discourages minority turnout. At least a dozen other politically conservative states said they would adopt a similar practice if Ohio prevailed, as a way of keeping their voter registration lists accurate and up to date. Prof. Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, predicted that a win for Ohio would escalate voting wars between the political parties. "You'll see more red states making it easier to drop people from the voter registration rolls," he said. President Donald Trump, who is in Singapore for the nuclear summit, cheered the decision on Monday night. Just won big Supreme Court decision on Voting! Great News! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2018 All states have procedures for removing from their registration lists the names of people who have moved and are therefore no longer eligible to vote in a given precinct. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether a voter's decision to sit out a certain number of elections could be the trigger for that effort. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, said the court's job was not "to decide whether Ohio’s supplemental process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not." Ohio election officials send notices to anyone who fails to cast a ballot during a two-year period. People who do not respond and don't vote over the next four years, including in two more federal elections, are dropped from the list of registered voters. Larry Harmon sits in his home in Kent, Ohio, on Aug. 4, 2017. Harmon was removed from the voting rolls after not voting in the last election. Maddie McGarvey / for NBC News That's what happened to Larry Harmon, a U.S. Navy veteran and software engineer who was turned away from his polling place in 2015 when he found out he wasn't on the list. "I looked and I looked. And I saw my son's name, but I didn't see my name." So he joined a civil rights group in suing the state. Ohio said he was sent a notice, but he said he didn't get it. A federal appeals court ruled against the state, concluding that roughly 7,500 Ohio voters — in a state that's perennially a presidential battleground — were wrongly purged from the list in the 2016 election. Opponents of Ohio's system, led by the A. Philip Randolph Institute, said it violated the National Voter Registration Act, which specifies that voters can be purged from the rolls only if they ask, move, are convicted of a felony, become mentally incapacitated, or die. More than half the voters in Ohio fail to cast a ballot over a two-year period, the group said, and those who receive the state's notices simply throw them away. "The Supreme Court got this one wrong. The right to vote is not 'use it or lose it,'" said Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters of the United States. "This decision will fuel the fire of voter suppressors across the country who want to make sure their chosen candidates win reelection, no matter what the voters say." Justice Stephen Breyer authored the dissent, which was joined by liberal justices Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, who also wrote a separate — and scathing — dissent. Sotomayor scolded the court's majority for ignoring "the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate." "Communities that are disproportionately affected by unnecessarily harsh registration laws should not tolerate efforts to marginalize their influence in the political process, nor should allies who recognize blatant unfairness stand idly by," Sotomayor added. The Ohio Democratic Party issuing a statement condemning the ruling. "Today’s split decision from the U.S. Supreme Court will unfortunately empower Republican officials across the country to continue making it harder for American citizens to vote," Chairman David Pepper said, adding that "voting rights are on the ballot with this November's elections."