“Supreme Court Upholds Ohio’s Purge of Voting Rolls”
My emphasis.
My emphasis.
Gee, the purpose of the voting process is to find out what candidates the voters want in office?? Nah. That idea will never catch on. The purpose of the voting process is to get your people elected and then create so many obstacles to opposition voters that it becomes difficult to impossible for the them to replace your people.
“3 Countries Where It’s Easier To Vote Than the United States”
*Compulsory voting with a fine?? That would never fly here. "Murricans don’t like being told what to do. Even when it’s the right thing. Geez, Australia is that country where people turned in their guns, anyway. Bunch o’ wimps.
Sorry, but here’s the deal: to be purged in Ohio, you had to accomplish the following:
You fail to vote, or do anything else vote-related for two years.
You fail to return a pre-addressed, stamped postcard verifying you continue to reside at the address.
You fail to vote for four more years.
So that’s six full years you have to have been silent as a voter, AND you have to have failed to return the card.
I have no problem with removing such people from the voting rolls. I think the focus should be on the other end: what does a person have to do to get ON the roll, and vote in an election. But if you aren’t voting, and aren’t keeping the local authorities apprised of your continued residence and eligibility to vote, it’s not unreasonable to clear the voter rolls of the dead wood. There might be * better ways to do it (almost certainly are), but it’s not Darth Vader evil to do so. And keep in mind, one alternative would be a national database of registered voters, tracking your every movement, accessible to any poll worker checking your eligibility to vote in a given election, tied in to all other databases of people and their claimed residences. Is that really the preferred option?
Doesn’t it cost more-- in both time and money-- to do this purging process than just leaving everyone be? What is the public benefit to it (political motivations aside)? It’s not like having long lists of eligible voters costs Ohio anything. I may be missing something obvious (non-political), but I just don’t see what the point is.
The federal law in question in the decision actually requires states to remove ineligible voters, and to undertake practices to identify voters no longer eligible at their registered addresses. So the issue wasn’t, “should this be done?” It was, rather, “how should this be done, given that we have to do it?”
This. What is the benefit, besides political? There isn’t a any.
There’s theoretical value in keeping people who’ve moved from voting in multiple locations. But they’re only purging people who didn’t vote the last time or two - also theoretically.
“Well, darn. We can’t seem to find any records of these Democrat voters voting in the last two elections. I’m sure we can clear this up, it’ll just take a few weeks. I imagine the records were just misplaced.”
Oh, be serious. Voting records are public records. Knowing whether or not a person voted in the last six years isn’t particularly hard to determine. It’s not like the Republicans in Ohio who initiated this process had to resort to skullduggery to remove thousands of voters from the rolls. :rolleyes:
What I heard about this case is this:
In the time period in question, Ohio removed approximately 20% of voters from the rolls.
In the time period in question, approximately 4% of people move to a location that’s in a new precinct.
Ohio’s voter roll purge disproportionately affected black and Hispanic voters.
The first two factors point to this being an inefficient method for updating voter rolls.
The third factor points to the possibility that this method was chosen for racist and/or partisan purposes.
Your facts are close, but I think a little off. According to Justice Breyer, Ohio sent notices to approximately 1.5 million voters (or 20%). Roughly 300,000 people responded to the notice (and were either not removed or removed because they did in fact move). 1 million (13%) did not respond at all. I don’t see in Breyer’s opinion any information regarding how many people were actually removed, but I may be overlooking it.
(He also claims that 4% of Americans move outside their county (not precinct) each year. That number is, apparently, 10% if you include people who move within their county. My county appears to have over 200 voting precincts, but that may be unusual. Breyer seems to think that intra-county moves don’t count.).
It seems to me, though, that your real complaint (and Breyer’s) is that the no-response+no-voting procedure established by the NVRA is inefficient. And I don’t know if the NVRA (which was passed largely along partisan lines) was designed for partisan or racist purposes. But I don’t see how any of these arguments relate to the manner in which Ohio implemented the NVRA (i.e., its use of non-voting as the notice-sending trigger).
I’m sorry, but I’m not seeing a problem here. Here in the UK if you don’t complete your voter registration you don’t get to vote. And you have to do it every few years; if you don’t you get dropped and lose your right to vote until you do register. So Ohio is striking off those who haven’t re-registered? Sounds perfectly normal to me.
I think the more pertinent stats were the fact that, in Cincinnati (IIRC), some 10% of (mostly-minority) voters were purged, whereas in an outlying suburban county, only 4% (mostly non-minority) were purged. So it definitely has a disparate impact.
Interestingly, Justice Alito’s opinion specifically points out to Justice Sotomayor (who seemed to raise this disparity in her dissent as a reason for finding the scheme either illegal or unconstitutional) that the plaintiffs did NOT raise the issue of disparate racial impact in their lawsuit, despite the fact that the federal law in question has a specific provision regarding that issue.
Re-registration isn’t a thing here. You register, and you’re good to go unless the state knocks you off the list for some reason.
One issue this woud have to bring up is how hard it may or may not be to re-register. Back in PR repeated failure to show up makes you an “inactive” voter and you have to go to the registration office to get “reactivated” — but not registered de novo, rather more like a change-of-address or lost-ID process — or would be set aside with a provisional ballot while that’s worked on. Of course our reg offices (a) are in every municipality (b) open year-round and weekends in the months leading to the deadline and © issue free of charge a voter photo-ID. In some other jurisdictions in the US, though, you may be fully struck from the rolls and have to rustle up at your own expense of time and money proof of identity, age, citizenship and residence as if you had never voted.
Estonia’s system wouldn’t fly very well here either. It’s based on having a government mandated identification card and using that ID to validate yourself when voting. It’s not Republicans that typically have an issue with mandatory identification for voting.
Here in Wyoming, you get purged if you don’t vote in a single general election.
If I fail to vote in November this year, I’ll have to re-register to vote in 2020. Not only that, I have to register in front of either a county clerk or a public notary.
If Ohio didn’t widely advertise that they were doing this, I can imagine it being easy to ignore or dismiss a post card, when you know you are already registered. I get one before each election, verifying where my polling place it. I see that blue post card, check the name of the church, and toss it away, without reading the whole thing.
I also want to see what those post cards send out look like. Just how clear is it, that it’s not junk mail.
Wisconsin did the same thing, and in their March primary found that yes, they had incorrectly removed people from the voting rolls.
Not requiring periodic reregistration seems a little foolish to me: people move quite often - IIRC it’s about every 7 years on average in the UK. I suppose it’s a holdover from times when people didn’t move as much.
Your country, your rules.
Removing voters from the polls isn’t enough to complicate voting. Republicans who are interested in suppressing the vote take it one step further: prosecuting people who unintentionally violate voting laws.