VOTING — TOO FEW OR TOO MANY

Nary a week goes by that some Democrat somewhere isn’t ranting about Republicans trying to prevent people from voting.

With county general elections and state primaries approaching next week, Tennessee again may hear from the usual suspects.

Where such complaining occurs, it usually concerns a state’s law that requires voters to produce a photo identification or a state’s purge of voters from rolls when they haven’t voted in any election over a certain period of time.

Democrats who squawk about the former never bother to mention that — as in Tennessee — numerous photo IDs are accepted for voting, many ID exceptions are made for voters and photos IDs can be issued by the state at no charge.

But it’s more expedient to complain than to help the people they are complaining about to get their necessary identifications.

As to voter purges, they help prevent voters from being registered in more than one place, keep the dead from voting (through nefarious means), and save the government money by not overprinting ballots and by not hiring unneeded poll workers.

Two court rulings this summer provide evidence why it is important for states to keep their rolls up to date. In one, a watchdog organization had to sue a state to get the state to act within parameters of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In the other, a state had to defend its practice of removing those who hadn’t voted within a certain time.

In the most recent case, Judicial Watch Inc. v. Alison Lundergan Grimes et al., a consent decree was signed last week by the state of Kentucky, which consented to clean its voter rolls of ineligible names.

Grimes is the state’s Democratic secretary of state — as such, she oversees state elections — and was the 2014 Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The lawsuit noted, among other things, that Kentucky was one of only three states in which the statewide active voter registration rate is greater than 100 percent of the age-eligible citizen population, that 48 Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18, and that Kentucky did not comply with federal laws requiring it to cancel the registrations of citizens who had died or moved elsewhere.

The Justice Department investigation also found the state had not sent the required notices to registrants under the change-of-address process laid out by the NVRA and state law since 2009 and had not removed registrants through the aforementioned process when they have moved to a new jurisdiction without notifying election officials since 2015.

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an Ohio law providing that the state would send address confirmation notices to all registered voters who had not voted in the previous two years.

The procedure in Ohio is for election officials to send voters who don’t go to the polls for two consecutive years a letter, asking them to confirm they are still living at the same address. If they do not reply and do not go to the polls for another four years, they are purged and have to re-register to become eligible to vote again.

In other words, in order to be removed, they will not have voted in at least six years, which, to us, reveals a clear lack of interest in the process. In other places, the process takes up to eight years.

Tennessee purges voters if they remain inactive for two straight federal election cycles, amounting to four years, but only after they have failed to respond to election officials about whether they’ve moved out of state. If, during those four years, they sign a petition or contact the local election commission they can return to active status.

Yet, the Supreme Court decision was not over whether Ohio could remove voters because they didn’t vote. According to the NVRA, they cannot. But the law allows voters the latitude to receive a notice to determine if they wish to maintain their registration. If the notice is not returned, then the state can take action. That’s the portion of the law on which the high court decision turned in a 5-4 vote.

In 2014, Judicial Watch was successful in getting Indiana to clean up its voter registration lists, and it has ongoing lawsuits against the state of Maryland and Montgomery County over their failure to release documents in violation of the NVRA and against California and its Los Angeles County over their failure to clean their voter rolls.

In California, similar to Kentucky, 11 of the state’s 58 counties have registration rates exceeding 100 percent of eligible voters, the state has a registration rate of about 101 percent of its age-eligible citizenry, about 21 percent of the state’s voters are designated as inactive, Los Angeles County has a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population and Los Angeles County has the highest number of inactive registrants of any single county in the country.

Clearly, the argument is less about states keeping people from voting and more about the potential of having more than one vote per person.