A U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday in a case out of Ohio might be good news for Mississippi in trying to reduce the bloat in its voter rolls.
By a 5-4 vote, the court upheld Ohio’s law that allows voters’ names to be purged if they have not cast a ballot for six years and have not responded to a notice asking them to confirm their residency.
Civil rights leaders say this is an effort to disenfranchise the minorities and poor. Rather, it is an attempt to have more accurate voter records.
Mississippi is notorious for having bloated voter rolls, with many counties having more registered voters than adult residents.
Bloated rolls create judicial inefficiencies, as counties have to send out huge numbers of jury summonses to pool a sufficient number of potential jurors.
Worse, bloated rolls are an invitation to voter fraud. The easiest way to impersonate a voter, especially with absentee ballots, is to have lots of names of people who have died or moved still on the rolls.
In the Ohio case — Husted vs. A. Philip Randolph Institute — there was nothing untoward about the process used to strike voters from the rolls. The Supreme Court noted that it followed guidelines to a T set by the National Voter Registration Act. Voters who hadn’t cast a ballot in two years are sent a pre-addressed, postage-paid return card asking them to verify they still live at the address. If they don’t send it in, they’re still left on the rolls for four more years and only removed if they don’t vote once during that time.
That process goes beyond what’s necessary to make sure a legitimate, active voter is not removed. To say that targets any certain demographic of people stretches the imagination, although the four most liberal justices on the high court thought that anyway, more out of their pre-existing thoughts about how the world works than the evidence presented in this case.
The 5-4 vote is an important victory for voting rolls in other states besides Ohio, and it also points to the importance of maintaining a conservative edge on the high court.
— Tim Kalich and Charlie Smith
