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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute today. The court's eventual decision will determine whether or not Ohio violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), also known as The Motor Voter Act, which requires states to improve opportunities to register to vote and specifies that states cannot remove, or initiate removing, a registered voter from the rolls based on whether or not they voted.
As a speaker at today's Protect Out Vote rally on the Supreme Court steps stated, "It's the National Voter Registration Act, not the National Purge Act.” GOP elected officials don't seem to understand that.
Ohio's defense is that the states purge process is in line with the NVRA’s change of address process, which allows states to send forwardable address confirmation notices to voters “believed to have moved” with a postage prepaid and pre-addressed response card to either confirm a continuing address or update the state with a new address. The state is then legally allowed to remove voters if they fail to 1.) respond to the mailer before two general federal elections take place, and 2.) do not vote in at least one of the two general federal elections following the notice’s mailing.
Many states carry out the NVRA change of address process, and some states like Ohio use voting activity, to “believe a voter has moved” and sends them a mailer. A pbs newshour segment on the Husted v APRI case lists 6 other states that do this. If the conservative leaning Supreme Court does side with APRI those state will have to end the practice of triggering a change of address process when a voter decides to exercise their right to not vote. But that won't stop the problem.
Republican elected officials use the change of address process outlined in the NVRA as a loophole to make voting harder; See Alabama, Indiana, Wisconsin … the list could go for quite a while. And even when they don't adhere to the process and violate the NVRA; see North Carolina, the damage is done at least in terms of the upcoming election.
For this issue to make it to the Supreme Court, it had to happen in a battleground state during a heated presidential election. Before the 2016 presidential election, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted purged hundreds of thousands of "inactive" voters from the voter rolls, leaving them unable to cast their vote in the election. This is not just unacceptable in Ohio. It is unacceptable in every single state.
Consider "red" states. Voters in so called "red" states don't live in majority Republican states, they live in states where voter laws are passed and manipulated to prevent primarily people of color from voting. Without protecting a registered voters choice to not vote we are setting up an easy win in "red" states for the GOP. When a registered voter in these states either choose not to vote or find themselves unable, they are fast tracked to be removed from the voter rolls.
Voter purges of any kind are always touted as a way to prevent non existent fraud across the board yet are always designed to keep certain groups, particularly communities of color, from casting ballots that count. It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration filed an amicus brief in support of Ohio's actions in the Husted v APRI case.
In the face of calculated, racist, and undemocratic purging of voter rolls, we have to show a ferocious commitment to defending the right to vote. And part of that commitment may need to be working at the national level to amend the NVRA's language around the change of address process, for example, by defining what is required for the state to "believe someone has moved". But that is for all intents and purposes an insurmountable task. So we are left withpassing legislation at the state level that prohibits state elections commissions from arbitrarily trying to remove voters en masse from the voter rolls.
Either way the SCOTUS case shakes out, voting rights defenders have our work cut out for us.