Court sees our vote as a privilege, not a right
Those of us who vote habitually may shrug off the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Monday upholding how Ohio purges non-voters.
The ruling should bother us, nonetheless.
Voting is a right referenced multiple times in our Constitution, but it is oftentimes treated as a privilege. The ruling only furthers that notion.
In this case, concerning a software engineer and Navy veteran who lives near Akron, Ohio, the high court says the state lawfully suspended the man’s voting rights because he failed to cast a ballot in consecutive federal elections and failed, after the first one, to return a state notice asking him to confirm his eligibility to vote.
Ohio imposed the law in order to update its roster of eligible voters and prevent fraud. It acted under the aegis of congressional acts that allowed states to remove voters “who have not responded to a notice and who have not voted in 2 consecutive” federal elections.
Ohio happens to boot people off its rosters in the quickest amount of time. Some 7,500 of them discovered it the hard way in 2016, when they showed up to vote and couldn’t.
In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that while federal laws forbid removing people from voter rolls “by reason of the person’s failure to vote,” Ohio does not use failure to vote as the sole criterion. “Ohio removes registrants only if they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a notice,” Alito wrote.
In other words, failing to respond to a mailed notice represents sufficient cause for losing the right to vote.
A one-time mailed notice. Never mind the reasons for not acting on it — whether you forgot about it, misplaced it or never got it in the first place.
I get the intent of the congressional actions, in particular having states cull ineligible voters from their list.
Alito cites a 2012 report from the Pew Center on the States that estimated that about 24 million voter registrations were either invalid or significantly inaccurate, and that more than 2.7 million people were registered to vote in more than one state.
The law, admittedly, isn’t without remedy. The persons knocked off the voter rolls need only to re-register, although that process poses greater challenge to individuals who have little or no access to the web or to transportation, or who are infirm.
Still, should the threshold for curbing the right to vote be set so low? Should the burden not be shifted to the state instead of the voter?
There are other avenues for governments to establish or corroborate one’s address in order to maintain rolls, including tax filings, the Social Security Administration, state Motor of Vehicle Divisions or the Postal Service.
And if data-sharing permission or privacy concerns are an obstacle, governments surely can find a way to overcome it.
That voting could be a use-it-or-loseit proposition — and, in essence, it is under the process and parameters Ohio uses — runs counter to democracy.
Ohio’s secretary of state said after Monday’s ruling that his state’s voter purging law is “a model for other states to use.”
They should use great caution before following Ohio.
Not everyone votes. That, too, is an American affirmation. Voting is a freedom, whether we exercise it or not. Government should take great care to not restrict the right.