At Supreme Court, Justices Clash on Right to Vote

      Viewed in strictly political terms, the Supreme Court's decision on Ohio's aggressive program of removing nonvoters from registration rolls was easy to predict — and the predictions proved to be right. Five Republican-appointed conservative justices voted to uphold a program that the state's Republican secretary of state touted as having removed 1 million people from voter rolls over three election cycles. But four Democratic-appointed liberal justices found the program to be in violation of a federal law that prohibits deregistering voters "by reason of a failure to vote."
      Writing for the majority in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute [June 11], Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrapped himself around what he saw as the clear meaning of overlapping statutory provisions from two federal laws passed a decade apart aimed, respectively, at making it easier to register to vote or actually to vote. He and his conservative colleagues saw in those laws permission for Ohio to warn non-voters that they would be removed from registration rolls unless they returned a mailed notice to prove their current residence.
      Unsurprisingly, given human nature, the vast majority of Ohioans who received those notices tossed the notices without returning them. Those who failed to vote in the next two elections were purged from the registration rolls: more than 1 million, by Husted's count, from the time of his election to the post in 2010 up to the beginning of the legal challenge to the procedure in 2015.
      Alito concluded a complex dissection of the two federal statutes involved by insisting that the liberal justices' dissent amounted to a "policy disagreement" rather than a different reading of the statutory provisions. He was right, but wrong in his diagnosis. The justices' policy difference turns not on the mechanics of updating registration rolls, but on the priority that the liberal bloc places on the right to vote itself.
      The liberal justices seem to have a better appreciation than the conservatives of the many hard battles fought to win and protect the right to vote from Seneca Falls in the 19th century to Selma in the 20th. As seen in the Court's decisions upholding voter-ID laws, the conservatives have too readily accepted the unsubstantiated fear of voter fraud spread for partisan reasons by Republican politicians and conservative interest groups. The liberal justices see the right to vote as too important to sacrifice to the partisan interests of those with an un-American distrust of the expanded franchise.
      Given Ohio's importance as a battleground state, the Court's decision is politically significant of itself in its implications for future elections. But it takes on more significance by giving election officials in other states a roadmap if they want to emulate Ohio's Jon Husted in bragging not about registering more voters but about removing once-qualified voters from registration rolls.
      Alito's claimed fidelity to congressional enactments strains credulity given the stated goal of the first of the two federal laws at issue. The National Voter Registration Act, enacted in 1993 and better known as the Motor Voter Act, was most prominently aimed at increasing voter registration. The law required states to allow would-be voters to register at sites used for obtaining driver's licenses or obtaining public assistance.
      Along with those provisions, the 1993 law also required states to establish a "general program" for updating voter registration rolls — specifically by making "a reasonable effort" to remove voters who become ineligible by changing their residence. But the act's Failure-to-Vote Clause specifically prohibited removing any registered voter "by reason of the person's failure to vote."
      The Help America Vote Act, enacted in 2002 with the Florida vote-count fiasco in mind, was aimed primarily at helping state and local election officials upgrade and safeguard their voting and vote-counting machinery with the assistance of a new federal agency, the Election Assistance Commission. The law also included a provision that either reinforced or merely clarified the Failure-to-Vote Clause by providing that no registrant be removed "solely by reason of a failure to vote."
      Writing for the four liberal dissenters, Justice Stephen G. Breyer argued that Ohio's procedure removed registered voters "by reason of" their failure to vote: the very reason they were selected for what he called the "last chance" notices. Alito countered by emphasizing the adverb "solely" in the later law: removed only for failing to confirm their residence, not for non-voting. Breyer had what ought to have been a convincing rebuttal: the state's effort to verify residence was not "reasonable," as the 1993 law required.
      Out of more than 1.5 million notices mailed out, fewer than one-third were returned, Breyer noted, with 60,000 confirming a change of address and 235,000 verifying their listed residence. It was unreasonable, Breyer argued, to assume that the 1 million-plus Ohioans who tossed the notices without returning them had moved. Indeed, he mocked the idea that 13 percent of Ohio's voting population had moved in a matter of years. "[T]he streets of Ohio's cities are not filled with moving vans," he wrote.
      In a separate dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cut to the chase by noting the disparate impact of Ohio's procedure: 10 percent of voters removed in African-American neighborhoods in Cincinnati compared to 4 percent in a majority-white suburban neighborhood. Alito's terse response: Sotomayor's concerns were "misconceived." The question naturally arises: what part of voter suppression do the conservatives not understand?