WASHINGTON (CN) - Challengers said the process blocked more than 7,500 qualified Ohioans from voting in the 2016 election, but the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Monday that the state's method of pruning its voter rolls comports with federal law.
Delivering the opinion for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said Ohio's method complies with the National Voter Registration Act because the state does not solely rely on a voter's inactivity to cull its voter rolls of people who have moved to a different district.
Ohio uses a multistep process for pruning its voter rolls of people who have moved outside of their voting district since the last election. First, the state checks its list of registered voters against a database of people who have given the U.S. Postal Service change-of-address information, sending a notice to anyone who has moved. Anyone who moves and does not change their registration or vote within four years of receiving the notice is then cut from the rolls.
In an effort to catch people who move without telling the Postal Service, as well, the state also sends notices to people who have not voted in two years. Anyone who does not vote or change their registration within four years of receiving the notice is then removed.
But voter-advocacy groups claimed that both the NVRA and its later amendment in the Help America Vote Act, forbid states from eliminating voters from registration rolls "by reason of the person's failure to vote."
Rejecting this argument Monday, however, Alito said Ohio's process easily squares with the federal law.
"We reject this argument because the failure-to-vote clause, both as originally enacted in the NVRA and as amended in the HVRA, simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant, and Ohio does not use it that way," the lead opinion states (emphasis in original).
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted praised the decision, saying Ohio will now be able to serve as a model for other states looking for a way to prune their voting rolls.
"Today's decision is a victory for election integrity and a defeat for those who use the federal court system to make election law across the country," Husted said in the statement. "This decision is a validation of Ohio's efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now with the blessing [of the] nation's highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to use."
Myrna Perez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center, said meanwhile that it is the precise concern of voting-rights activists is that other states will follow Ohio's policy lead.
"While this is disappointing, Ohio is one of only a few states that used failure to vote as a trigger for kicking someone off the rolls," Perez said in the statement. "Our worry is that other states will take this decision as a green light to implement more aggressive voter purges as the 2018 elections loom."
An appointee of President George W. Bush, Alito said that the challengers’ interpretation would "cannibalize" the nested requirements of NVRA and HAVA.