State voter rules are reasonable
Voters should keep info current
Ohio’s system of elections is once again under national scrutiny, this time for the way in which voter rolls are kept up to date. And once again, Ohio has a good case to make.
The American Civil Liberties Union charges that the state disenfranchises voters by canceling their registrations after they are inactive for six years. But how long should a state of 11.6 million people continue to maintain an active record on someone who hasn’t voted in six years and has ignored four years’ worth of notices?
The U.S. Supreme Court is to take up that question today, with oral arguments scheduled for the ACLU’s ongoing suit.
A U.S. District Court judge in June 2016 ruled that Ohio’s system is legal, but the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision in September 2016, finding that the policy violates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.
In July, Secretary of State Jon Husted asked the high court to take up the case. He was right to do so. States face plenty of hurdles, including limited resources, to keeping accurate and updated voter records. If Ohio loses this case, it and more than a dozen other states with similar processes face the prospect of voter rolls bloated with people who have died or are long gone from the state.
That isn’t just untidy; maintaining abandoned voter registrations leaves an opening for fraud and complicates Election Day, by forcing poll workers to scan longer lists to find each voter who actually shows up.
We maintain the position we’ve long held, that fraud in Ohio elections is essentially nonexistent. But why open a door by saving a place at the polls for thousands of people who aren’t going to come?
Opponents of the state’s practice might ask, what about people who have been purged for being inactive and then are turned away when they decide to rejoin the democratic process?
If, as the ACLU asserts, 7,500 would-be voters were turned away in November 2016 because their registrations had been invalidated, that is unfortunate. But it’s fair to ask why they didn’t respond when the secretary of state’s office asked whether they had moved, or respond to any of the other routine notices registered voters receive yearly?
If they had moved, why didn’t they update their registrations? Ohio makes it easy, with an online system through which nearly a half-million voters have updated their registrations.
The federal law in question bars states from canceling any voter’s registration simply for failure to vote. That would be wrong, and that isn’t what Ohio does.
The best cure for would-be voters being turned away at the polls is for more voting-age Ohioans to keep their registrations current.
It’s no secret that Democrats, minority and low-income voters are more likely than others to go without voting for years, and roll-purging thus affects those groups disproportionately.
But the simple requirement to keep your registration current isn’t unreasonable. Voterrights groups should focus efforts on getting the word out. And the secretary of state’s office should do everything it can to help them.