Supreme Court to hear Ohio case on purging voter rolls
State’s process is among strictest in the country
WASHINGTON – Joe Helle served six years as an Army infantryman and sergeant, including 15 months in Iraq and four months in Afghanistan a decade ago. Ohio rewarded him in 2011 by taking away his right to vote.
Helle had become a casualty in Ohio’s effort to maintain accurate voter registration rolls. Because he had not voted in six years and did not return a warning notice, his most basic right was removed.
“I broke down into tears,” the war veteran recalls.
Helle, 31, the mayor of tiny Oak Harbor (pop. 2,759), is among those closely watching the Supreme Court, which on Wednesday will hear state officials contest lower court rulings that their process of cleaning up voter rolls violates federal laws.
“It’s absolutely voter suppression,” Helle, a Democrat, says. “There is no other good reason for it.”
He’s not alone. Groups representing racial and ethnic minorities, veterans and people with disabilities have joined the opposition in the latest in a series of battles against states’ efforts to restrict voting rights and combat suspected voter fraud.
The Supreme Court has heard a bevy of voting rights cases since its controversial decision in 2013 to strike down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which had forced mostly Southern states to clear changes in election laws with federal officials.
Last term, the justices nixed the excessive use of race in redistricting by legislatures in North Carolina and Virginia. This term, it faces cases from Wisconsin and Maryland challenging what opponents claim were election maps drawn by state legislators for purely partisan gain. Another case is pending from Texas.
Several other states that use the failure to vote as a trigger in efforts to cleanse their registration rolls could be affected by the high court’s decision in the Ohio case, including Georgia, Okla- homa, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and
West Virginia.
Ohio has removed thousands of people who voted in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, but who didn’t try to vote again until at least 2015. The process is run haphazardly by county officials, according to an investigation in 2016 by The Cincinnati Enquirer and the USA TODAY Network.
Under federal laws enacted in 1993 and 2002, states cannot remove voters from registration lists because of failure to vote, but they can do so if voters don’t respond to confirmation notices.
The question for the Supreme Court to resolve is whether a failure to vote can be the initial trigger leading to removal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in 2016 said no, which resulted in the votes of 7,515 Ohioans being restored.
“None of these voters had become ineligible to vote by reason of a change in residence or otherwise,” the voting rights group Demos argued in court papers. “Nonetheless, all had been purged from the rolls.”
Most voters who suffer that fate initially fail to vote in midterm elections. About 70% of registered voters turn out for presidential elections in Ohio, but that drops below 50% in midterms.
Navy veteran Larry Harmon was among those purged from the rolls in 2015. He voted in 2008 but skipped the next two years. Harmon says he doesn’t recall getting a warning from the state in 2011, after which he continued to skip voting. But he never moved away.
According to Census Bureau data, most people fail to vote because they don’t like the candidates, or their busy schedules get in the way.
Ohio argues in court papers that the mailed warning notice — not the failure to vote — is the key to the process. Those knocked off the rolls are penalized for failing to respond.