Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Ohio's Voting Roll Purge
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to allow Ohio to clean up its voting rolls by removing from it people who have not voted in a while. This ruling, which is seen as a green light for Ohio's cleanup policy, is now seen as another new layer on an ongoing debate about user rights.
At least one civil rights group has called the decision a "green light" for the state in their ongoing efforts to clean up its voter registration rolls, which a group spokesperson has called a "purge," according to The Guardian.
On the other side of the debate. the Republican secretary of state for Ohio has called the supreme court decision "a victory for electoral integrity."
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It was a clear vote along partisan lines for the supreme court justices on Monday, June 11. With five votes from the conservative justices, the court has rejected arguments that the Ohio voter roll clean-up was a violation of a federal law, one which was intended to retain more registered voters when possible.
According to Justice Samul Alito, among the justices who rejected the arguments, the practice Ohio has been implementing did comply with the amended 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which has been updated with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. The four votes in dissent were from liberal justices.
As it is in the state right now, people who have not voted for two consecutive years were sent a notice via mail, one meant to find out if they have moved out. If the recipient fails to respond to the notice and then proceeds to skip elections for four more consecutive years, they are then stricken from Ohio voter rolls, as the Huffington Post explained the process.
Critics called the practice a violation of a federal law that prohibits states from canceling voter registration just on the grounds that they have not voted for a time.
Adding the failure to respond to the notice technically makes Ohio's policy pass the criteria set by HAVA, according to Alito. "HAVA dispelled any doubt that a state removal program may use the failure to vote as a factor (but not the sole factor) in removing names from the list of registered voters," he wrote in the ruling.
"That is exactly what Ohio's Supplemental Process does. It does not strike any registrant solely by reason of the failure to vote," the explanation continued.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, part of the dissenting opinion, took special note of the way the Ohio practice had a disproportionate impact on low-income, minority, or disabled voters. In her own dissension note, she pointed out that ten percent of African American voters in downtown Cincinnati were removed from voter rolls since 2010, compared to four percent for those living in majority-white suburbs.
