Yesterday December, 31, 2017 Julie Carr Smyth and Marl Sherman @ AP posted this story:
They begin their report with what actually happens to Tens of thousands of voters as a plank of the GOP platform:
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Joseph Helle was expecting a different sort of reception when he returned home from Army tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and showed up to vote in his small Ohio town near Lake Erie.
His name was missing from the voting rolls in 2011, even though Helle had registered to vote before leaving home at 18 and hadn't changed his address during his military service.
Helle, now the mayor of Oak Harbor, Ohio, is among thousands of state residents with tales of being removed from Ohio's rolls because they didn't vote in some elections. The Supreme Court will hear arguments Jan. 10 in the disputed practice, which generally pits Democrats against Republicans.
Ohio’s secretary of state Jon Husted has been at this voter suppression campaign for some time now.
Charles pierce had this to say about Husted back in December of 2012:
One of the true booby prizes presented to the nation by democracy-fk-yeah! is Jon Husted, the Secretary Of State in Ohio, who is now out on the conference circuit, defending the multifarious ways he (vainly, thank god) used his office to keep the wrong people from voting, and it should be remembered that these included telling federal judges to get stuffed — something which, in other circumstances, might enable a fella to do an in-depth study of institutional dining in some of our finer federal facilities.
Charles Pierce points out that the judges did not believe Jon Husted’s excuses:
There are very good reasons why "critics" don't believe that. Those reasons were best summed up by one of the judges whom Husted told to get stuffed.
In a scathing 17-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley said a directive on counting provisional ballots that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted issued on Nov. 2 was
"a flagrant violation of a state elections law"
that could disenfranchise voters.
"The surreptitious manner in which the secretary went about implementing this last minute change to the election rules casts serious doubt on his protestations of good faith,"
Marbley wrote.
Purging people from the voter rolls is just one part of the GOP’s efforts that they claim is legal:
The Trump administration said the practice complies with federal law because people are not removed from the rolls "by reason of their initial failure to vote."
They are sent a notice, the administration said in its Supreme Court brief, but only removed if "they fail to respond and fail to vote" in the elections that follow the notice.
It is not legal. And this agenda is not limited to Ohio:
Ohio, backed by 17 other mostly Republican states, said it is complying with federal law.
The republican’s are attempting to make it so, if a person chooses not to vote in every election, then that person should be scrubbed off the voter rolls system, their registration cancelled
The main argument on behalf of voters whose registrations were canceled is that federal voting law specifically prohibits states from using voter inactivity to trigger purges.
The state
"purges registered voters who are still eligible to vote,"
former and current Ohio elections officials said in a brief supporting the voters.
Husted (R) tried this fake “voter fraud protection racket" and a judge closed him down:
Ohio has used voters' inactivity to trigger the removal process since 1994, although groups representing voters did not sue the Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, until 2016.
As part of the lawsuit, a judge last year ordered the state to count 7,515 ballots cast by people whose names had been removed from the voter rolls.
This:
In 2015, Cuyahoga County –- Ohio's biggest county –- canceled 40,000 registrations based only on residents' failure to vote, and a disproportionate number of those removed were in poor neighborhoods and people of color, according to Demos.
A recent Reuters report found that across Ohio's biggest cities -- Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati -- a total of 144,000 had been removed from voter registration rolls, and that voters from Democratic-leaning neighborhoods were removed at roughly twice the rate as Republican-leaning neighborhoods.
Meanwhile:
A decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, 16-980, is expected by late June.
I do have real concerns, even doubts, that the recent Heritage Foundation supreme court pick, Neil Gorsuch, will suspend his partisan judicial activism long enough to stand on the side of the voter and protect the RIght to Vote
I hope I’m wrong
Here is some very good information for taking Action:
Sunday Oct 01, 2017 · 7:31 AM PDT
2017/10/01 · 07:31