Supreme Court allows states to purge voter registrations
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court made it easier Monday for states to remove occasional voters from the rolls, upholding an Ohio law that drops voters who fail to cast a ballot and do not respond to several notices.
In a 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority agreed with Ohio Republicans who said they sought to “clean up” the voting rolls by purging the names of people who appeared to have moved and left the area. The court said that nationwide, 24 million voter registrations are estimated to be inaccurate or invalid, mostly of people who have moved.
The four liberal justices dissented and said the ruling would allow officials to wrongly eliminate the voter registrations of people who sat out an election or two and did not respond to notices in the mail.
The legal dispute played out against a backdrop where two major parties have opposite views. Republicans spoke of voter fraud and election rolls they said were stocked with ineligible and illegal voters, while Democrats complained of voter suppression by GOP states, which they said made it harder for minorities and the poor to cast ballots.
Ohio has gone further than other states in trying to “clean up” its voter rolls, and liberal activists said they feared its model will now be used in other Republican-leaning states.
“Voters should not be purged from the rolls simply because they have exercised their right not to vote. This ruling is a setback for voting rights, but it is not a green light to engage in wholesale purges of eligible voters without notice,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted called the decision “a victory for election integrity, and a defeat for those who use the federal court system to make election law across the country. 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.”
Civil rights lawyers had sued Ohio and argued that thousands of voters in Cleveland and other big cities had been wrongly removed from voting rolls. They won an appeals court ruling that held the state was violating the federal “Motor Voter Act” by removing voters simply for a “failure to vote.”
At issue was how to interpret two federal laws that set conflicting goals. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, often called the Motor Voter Act, sought to “increase the number of eligible voters who register to vote” and protect the “integrity of the electoral process” by maintaining “accurate and current voter registration rolls.” The Help America Vote Act of 2002 said states should make a “reasonable effort to remove registrants who are ineligible to vote” by dropping those who skipped elections and did not respond to notices.