We just can't stop winning!
In a five-justice majority, the SCOTUS voted to uphold Ohio's voter purge system.
The ruling finds that the process the state uses to remove inactive voters from their
rolls does NOT violate federal law.
This ruling goes a long way in helping to secure "voter integrity" and combat voter
fraud and illegals, or people unauthorized to vote, to cast a ballot.
Critics of the law, claim this is a way for Republicans to "purge" left-leaning voters
off the roll since they're the majority of past voters being purged.
From Daily Caller
A five-justice majority of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio's voter purge system,
finding the process by which the state removes inactive voters from the rolls does not violate
federal law.
Although critics of Ohio's practice charge the state's true purpose is the removal
of left-leaning voters from the registry, the high court found the process is consistent
with federal law.
"Today's decision is a victory for election integrity, and a defeat for those who use
the federal court system to make election law across the country," Ohio Secretary
of State John Husted said.
"This decision is validation of Ohio's efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now
with the blessing nation's highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to
use."
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the Court's opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices
Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
Justice Stephen Breyer led the liberal bloc in dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Ohio's maintenance process is fairly straightforward.
Voters who do not cast a ballot during a full federal election cycle (which runs two years)
are sent a mailer confirming they are still residents of Ohio who wish to remain registered
voters.
If the mailer is not returned, and if the individual does not vote for the next four
years, they are removed from state rolls.
The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) requires all states to adopt policies providing
for the removal of ineligible voters from state rolls.
In his opinion for the Court, Alito claimed 24 million voter registrations are currently
"invalid or significantly inaccurate," according to a 2012 study from the Pew Center
on the States.
However, the NVRA forbids removal "by reason of the person's failure to vote."
Civil rights and good government groups challenged the Ohio procedure, arguing it targets and
prunes voters on the basis of their inactivity.
Nonvoting, the challengers point out, is used twice by the state's process: once as the
trigger for the mailer, and again as a condition for final removal.
But Alito explained that the NVRA only prohibits the use of nonvoting as the sole cause for
deregistration.
"We reject this argument because the Failure-to-Vote Clause, as originally enacted in the NVRA…,
simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant,
and Ohio does not use it that way," he wrote.
Sotomayor wrote her own dissent connecting Ohio's procedure to "concerted state efforts
to prevent minorities from voting and to undermine the efficacy of their votes," that the NVRA
sought to curtail.
Progressive organizers hit a similar tenor speaking after the ruling.
"Countless voters, including homeless and housing-insecure Ohioans, have already been
stripped of their rights as a result of Ohio's unjust and illogical purge process," said
Chris Knestrick, executive director, Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.
"By greenlighting Ohio's purge process, the Court allowed states to shut out the voices
of these voters."
Defenders of the process say it ensures the states maintain accurate voter rolls, which
are not often updated to reflect forms of attrition like death or relocation.
Opponents charge it is yet another iteration of GOP voter-suppression tactics, particularly
because nonvoting is a poor proxy change in residence.
The civil rights groups challenging Ohio's policy seized on this point, citing another
provision of the NVRA which permits states to use U.S. Postal Service (USPS) data when
sending confirmation mailers of the sort Ohio uses.
This, the plaintiffs said, indicates that states may only use data points with a high
degree of correlation to relocation as a trigger for the mailer, like USPS information or tax
records.
But Alito rejected that arguments as well, stressing that their role was not to scrutinize
the good faith policy judgements of Ohio's state legislature.
"What matters for present purposes is not whether the Ohio legislature overestimated
the correlation between nonvoting and moving or whether it reached a wise policy judgment
about when return cards should be sent," he wrote.
"For us, all that matters is that no provision of the NVRA prohibits the legislature from
implementing that judgment."
Some 30 states filed amicus (or "friend-of-the-Court") briefs in the dispute.
A coalition of 12 Democratic states filed a brief arguing Ohio's practices were unlawful,
while 17 Republican states urged the high court to uphold them.
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