High court ruling makes it easy to drop once-in-awhile voters from election rolls.
Many of you vote but only during general elections and even then only in presidential election years.
Thanks for participating, but to supervoters, you’re like people who call themselves baseball fans but only watch the World Series. You’re aware of the sport but are barely paying attention.
And on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court just made it easier to bar you from the game altogether.
In a 5-4 ruling, the high court majority approved Ohio’s policy of canceling the voter registrations for people who miss a few elections.
All states weed out people who have missed a lot of elections on the assumption they may have died or moved elsewhere. There are many better ways to find that out if these voters have moved on physically or metaphorically, but looking for missed elections is how the process often gets triggered.
In Florida, you get tagged as an inactive voter because you haven’t voted in two general elections. Your county election supervisor will then send you a postcard to confirm your registration address. But even if you ignore the postcard (and really, I tend to disbelieve the official-looking mail I get because so many come-ons are printed up to look like official communications), you still get two more general election cycles to show up and prove you’re still here and alive.
Last year, 222,220 inactive voters were removed from the rolls in a state with 12.9 million registered voters.
But Ohio is way more unforgiving.
Missing only one general election there triggers the process of invalidating your registration. Sit out one election that has nothing on the ballot but some state stuff you never heard of and a U.S. representative who’s a stranger to you and you’re on the countdown to cross-out.
Fail to respond to a notice in the mail – again, notices like that look like junk mail to me – then fail to vote in the next four years, and you’re off the rolls. Ohio is the only state that starts the ball rolling after only one missed election.
The court majority concluded with a shrug: “We have no authority to second-guess Congress or to decide whether Ohio’s Supplemental Process is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not.”
Short version: Ohio may have a dumb, harshly bureaucratic law that keeps people from voting for no good reason, but, hey, it’s not our job to say they can’t.
Absent safeguards, use-it-or-lose-it voter roll purges can throw out legitimate voters who only want to vote in presidential election years and maybe then only when a candidate appeals to them. There are a lot of people like that. Voter turnout in presidential years is about 60 percent compared with 40 percent in midterms. Big difference.
Requiring frequent voting to stay registered is particularly hard on members of the military who may be away from their permanent addresses for extended periods.
Which is why the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 forbids states from just using inactivity to remove voters from the rolls. The court majority, however, found Ohio’s use of a single postcard notice gets around that prohibition.
Given Florida’s long and rich history of voter roll purges undertaken with partisan intent, it’s easy to wonder how the Florida Legislature will react to the ruling. My guess is that we’ll have an Ohio-style voter purge law by this time next year.
So remember to vote even if in those nonpresidential election year, nothingburger elections. Your vote has more impact, and it could save you bureaucratic hassle down the road.