An important election law case will be held on Wednesday when the U.S. Supreme Court will be deciding on easy access to voting or the need for election integrity.
This comes after Ohio sent a notice to voters that have not voted in the past two years in order to maintain accurate voter rolls. If the voter does not respond and does not vote in the next two federal elections, Ohio will remove the person from its voter rolls. This has raised some questions regarding whether it violates federal law.
New York, California and 10 other states are encouraging the Supreme Court to ban Ohio’s way of removing voters who do not vote or have failed to respond to the state’s notice.
California going against Ohio is ironical since the state is being sued by the Judicial Watch for having more registered voters than eligible voters, Reuters reported.
On the other hand, California has a similar law regarding inactive voters, the California Election Code 2224 which states that, “If a voter has not voted in an election within the preceding four years, and his or her residence address, name, or party preference has not been updated during that time, the county elections official may send an alternate residency confirmation postcard. … The postcard … shall be in substantially the following form: … If confirmation has not been received within 15 days, you may be required to provide proof of your residence address in order to vote at future elections.”
It is mportant to mention that California no longer requires voters to show an ID in order to vote. In 2016 there were reports that at least in one case a person signed her father-in-law’s name and voted for him, while her father-in-law had been dead for many years. Another voter also said that she could not get her dead aunt removed from the voter rolls. Apparently, the county did not remove her as the aunt had been voting regularly over the last 10 years while being dead.
A Harvard University study that was conducted in 2016 put the US last among the 28 western democracies in election integrity.
“All citizens have both the civil right to have their vote cast and counted without dilution by illegal votes … and the civil responsibility to keep their own registrations current. Citizens are required to renew their driver’s licenses from time to time; it should not be a constitutional crisis for voters to renew their voter registrations from time to time,” an Ohio official said.
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