Court upholds Ohio’s vote suppression scheme
With the 2018 elections fast approaching, federal and state officials should be doing everything in their power to ensure that more eligible voters get to the polls.
But on Monday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, upheld a controversial Ohio practice in which failing to vote for just two years can ultimately lead to being purged from the voting rolls — a practice that removed 7,500 eligible voters there in 2016.
The practice tends to disproportionately purge African Americans and other minorities, who tend to vote less often in midterm elections than whites. And it fits with a deplorable trend in some Republican-led states to make it harder for minority voters to register — and now, apparently, to remain eligible after registering.
The ruling protects similar laws in Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and it allows other states to adopt Ohio’s method. Just because states can, however, doesn’t mean they should.
“No other state … has a practice as ham-handed and draconian as Ohio’s,” the League of Women Voters wrote in a legal brief filed in the case.
Keeping registration rolls accurate is key to fair elections. But there are plenty of effective ways to do so, including sharing address data among state agencies and using postal information about who has moved, without punishing people for not voting.
Ohio’s removal process is triggered by the mere failure to vote for two years. The state then sends voters a notice with a return card to determine whether they remain eligible. If the card isn’t returned and the voters don’t vote for the next four years, they’re purged and have to re-register.
Ohio’s process, opponents argue, conflicts with a federal law that voters cannot be removed from the rolls for failing to vote. But the Supreme Court decided, in essence, that while the Ohio process is triggered by the failure to vote, people aren’t removed until they fail to respond to the state notice.
That analysis doesn’t take into account how things really work. In 2012, Ohio sent 1.5 million “last chance” notices to voters it planned to purge if they didn’t return them. More than 1 million never came back.
“We have no authority to secondguess Congress or to decide whether Ohio’s (law) is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not.”
Voting is America’s most basic right, and nothing about a state’s voting system should fall more harshly on certain voters than others. If federal law is allowing that to happen, it’s time for Congress to change that law.