Ohio’s using failure to vote twice, as the respondents pointed out: It’s their failure to vote that triggers the Supplemental Process, and it’s failure to vote that clinches their eligibility for removal from the rolls. As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent, “Under the Supplemental Process, a person’s failure to vote is the sole basis on which the State identifies a registrant as a person whose address may have changed and the sole reason Ohio initiates a registered voter’s removal.”
Yet the Supreme Court sided with the Sixth Circuit dissenter, accepting Ohio’s claim that it’s merely following the NVRA.
Alito takes an underhanded swipe at Sotomayor that reads as tinged with sexism and perhaps racism, though being Latinx is a matter of ethnicity. A section begins, “Justice Sotomayor’s dissent says nothing about what is relevant in this case”—that’s enough to bring a legal reader to a screeching halt. Instead, he claims, she “accuses us of ‘ignor[ing] the history of voter suppression’ in this country and of ‘uphold[ing] a program that appears to further the ... disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters.’”
Subtext: Hysterical woman! Biased Latina!
Alito singled her out, by the way, although Breyer’s was the main dissent; although Alito likewise characterized Breyer’s as as a policy disagreement; and although Sotomayor begins her dissent by noting that she joined the primary dissent in full and is only writing separately to emphasize the history and purpose of the NVRA.
Of course, there are other indications that Alito on the defensive. The majority self-consciously begins the opinion with sentences citing the Pew Center on the States on the number of invalid or inaccurate registrations and multi-state registrations—a Trump hobby horse—even though there’s little evidence of double-voting, making multi-state registration a rather benign concern. There were just 80 criminal convictions for duplicate voting from 2001 to 2017 according to the Heritage Foundation, presumably despite its best efforts to drum up evidence of a threat. Another purge program, the Interstate Crosscheck Program, is estimated to purge 300 valid registrations for every double voter.
Perhaps the Court’s worried, even as it channels Trump, about being perceived as too much in alignment with him? They’d have been better off to focus on the NVRA without drawing attention to the fact that Republicans have been spinning voter suppression laws as the solution to problems that don’t exist.