Justices uphold Ohio’s voter purge
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls.
The court ruled that a state may kick people off the rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state election officials. The vote was 5-4, with the more conservative justices in the majority.
On one level, the decision sought to make sense of tangled statutory language. But it was also the latest battle in a partisan war over how far states can go in imposing all kinds of voting restrictions, including cutbacks on early voting, elimination of sameday registration and tough voter ID laws.
Republicans have pushed for such restrictions, arguing without evidence that they are needed to combat widespread voter fraud. Democrats have pushed back, countering that the efforts are part of an attempt to suppress Democratic constituencies from voting, particularly minorities.
The case concerned Larry Harmon, a software engineer and Navy veteran who lives near Akron. He voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but did not vote in 2012, saying he was unimpressed by the candidates. He also sat out the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014.
But in 2015, Harmon did want to vote against a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and found that his name had been stricken from the voting rolls. State officials said that they had done so after sending Harmon a notice in 2011 asking him to confirm his eligibility to vote and that he did not respond. Harmon said he did not remember receiving a notice.
Federal laws prohibit states from removing people from voter rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But they allow election officials who suspect that a voter has moved to send a confirmation notice.
The central question in the case was whether a failure to vote could be the reason to send out the notice.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said federal laws allowed such notices as part of a process to cull inaccuracies from the voting rolls. A key provision, he wrote, “simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant, and Ohio does not use it that way.”
“Instead,” he wrote, “Ohio removes registrants only if they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a notice.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined the majority opinion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati ruled in favor of Harmon in 2016, saying that Ohio had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by using the failure to vote as a “trigger” for sending the notices.
Without that decision, “the ballots of more than 7,500 eligible Ohioans would have gone uncounted in the November 2016 election,” Harmon’s lawyers at Demos, a liberal think tank, and the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a Supreme Court brief.