Supreme Court Lets Ohio to Continue Purging Non-Active Voters

The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a controversial voter purge policy in Ohio, which is the first of the several voting disputes the court is expected to settle in near future.   

According to NBC News, in a 5-4 decision, the court upheld Ohio’s “use it or lose it” policy, known as the supplemental process.

Under Ohio’s policy, voters who haven’t voted in two years are sent a confirmation notice; if they fail to respond to the notice and don’t vote within the next two years, they are removed from the rolls.

Although critics claim the policy violates a federal law that bars states from removing people from the voter rolls for failing to vote, the majority of the high court rejected that argument.

The court’s five conservative justices, led by Justice Samuel Alito, voted in the majority, with the court’s four liberals, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, dissenting.

While delivering the majority opinion, Alito said that the state’s process does not violate the National Voter Registration Act’s failure-to-vote clause or any of the law’s other provisions.

“The notice in question here warns recipients that unless they take the simple and easy step of mailing back the pre-addressed, postage prepaid card, or take the equally easy step of updating their information online, their names may be removed from the voting rolls if they do not vote during the next four years,” Alito wrote. “It was Congress’s judgment that a reasonable person with an interest in voting is not likely to ignore the notice of this sort.”

Democrats together with the American Civil Liberties Union brought the lawsuit on behalf of Ohio resident Larry Harmon. They argued that the policy specifically targets minority and low-income people, two groups that traditionally have lower voter turnout, with which Justice Sonia Sotomayor agreed.

“The Court errs in ignoring this history and distorting the statutory text to arrive at a conclusion that not only is contrary to the plain language of the NVRA but also contradicts the essential purposes of the statute, ultimately sanctioning the very purging that Congress expressly sought to protect against,” she said.