Supreme Court Says Ohio Can Purge Its Voting Rolls

Another decision in from the Supreme Court!

According to this, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that states like Ohio can, in fact, purge their voting rolls. In other words, the state can “delete” people who have been inactive. The idea is to weed out serious voter fraud.

NEWS: Supreme Court rules 5-4 to uphold Ohio’s purge of infrequent voters from the databases. Familiar ideological split with Alito writing and backed by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Gorsuch.https://t.co/9rC2vpbm8i

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 11, 2018

#SCOTUS Upholds OH Voter Law:

→”Use-It-Or-Lose-It”: OH voters get registration confirmation notice if they don’t vote in 2 straight elections

→Voters are removed from rolls if they don’t respond & don’t vote over next 4 yrs

→Majority: Alito, Roberts, Kennedy Gorsuch, Thomas https://t.co/k1Z5SMNOQk

— Fox News Research (@FoxNewsResearch) June 11, 2018

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that Ohio is allowed to purge eligible voters from the state’s registration records if they have not cast ballots in a while.

In a 5-4 ruling issued by Justice Samuel Alito, the high court ruled that Ohio’s law to trigger the removal of inactive voters from the state’s registry can be enforced.

State officials argued that the process used by Ohio for more than 20 years is constitutional and legal, and meant to ensure election security.

Civil liberties groups challenged the state’s program for removing thousands of people from voter rolls based on their failure to vote in recent elections, claiming it violated the National Voter Registration Act.

But Alito said that Ohio is complying with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. At least six other states have similar rules in place, and Monday’s decision could lead others to adopt similar procedures.

It’s not exactly “easy” to have your info purged. You basically have to ignore all the signs and essentially suppress your OWN vote for quite some time.

“It is undisputed that Ohio does not remove a registrant on change-of-residence grounds unless the registrant is sent and fails to mail back a return card and then fails to vote for an additional four years,” Alito wrote in his opinion.

However, Alito made sure to point out that this isn’t a nod of approval to the state’s method. He simply said the current method does not violate federal law.

“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,” he added. “The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not.”

Alito, in his opinion, clarified that states could not use the failure to vote as the sole reason for removal from the register. Officials would be required to show someone had changed their residence, was incarcerated or met other criteria.

Alito also cited statistics that 24 million voter registrations—about one in eight—are “either invalid or significantly inaccurate,” and that about 2.75 million people “are said to be registered to vote on more than one state.”

Of course, all of the liberal justices (Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan) dissented. Sotomayor went as far as saying that this ruling will open the door for voter suppression.

“Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote,” she said. “Communities that are disproportionately affected by unnecessarily harsh registration laws should not tolerate efforts to marginalize their influence in the political process, nor should allies who recognize blatant unfairness stand idly by.”

Keep your information updated and vote. The end. Then it’s not an issue.

Alito’s takedown was epic.

Justice Alito’s response, in full, to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent is all the more brutal for being concise. pic.twitter.com/WV9esRpUst

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 11, 2018

Bam.

h/t Fox News