“The closer we get to the elections, the more difficult it will be to remedy any maps that are held unconstitutional in time for the election,” Stuart Naifeh, of the Demos think tank in New York, told Bloomberg Law. Demos is involved in its own high court voting challenge over voter purges by Republicans in Ohio.[...]
Settlement in “Motor Voter” Case in Time for 2018 Elections
SACRAMENTO - Millions of Californians who renew their driver’s license or state identification by mail will be able to use the renewal form to register to vote or update their voter registration, starting in April of 2018.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard our Ohio voter purge case, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. At issue in the case is Ohio’s Supplemental Process, an unjust practice of removing infrequent voters from its registration rolls.
Demos Senior Campaign Strategist, Vijay Das, gave the following prepared remarks urging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of protecting the freedom to vote.
Six other states — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — have similar practices that target voters for removal from the rolls for not voting, but Ohio’s is the most extreme.
“The National Voting Rights Act sought to eliminate practices such as Ohio’s that penalize people who exercise their right not to vote,” Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at the liberal think tank Demos, said in a call with reporters last week.
WASHINGTON – Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union presented arguments today to the U.S. Supreme Court in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), a case focusing on Ohio’s practice of purging voters from its registration rolls. The groups argued that the Supplemental Process directly violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).
"None of these voters had become ineligible to vote by reason of a change in residence or otherwise," the voting rights group Demos, representing the A. Philip Randolph Institute, argued in court papers. "Nonetheless, all had been purged from the rolls." [...]
But Stuart Naifeh of Demos says about four in five voters who receive the notices don't send them back. “People don’t look at their mail all that closely,” he says.
“They want the ability to use non-voting to remove people,” Demos senior counsel Stuart Naifeh, who is representing the Ohio challengers, told TPM. “And in these cases that they’ve brought or threatened to bring, they want counties or states to adopt that as a practice.”
The D.C. Council unanimously backed publicly financed campaigns Tuesday, a move lauded by clean-government advocates in a city long plagued by its association with a pay-to-play culture.[...]
The justices will hear arguments in Republican-governed Ohio’s appeal of a lower court ruling that blocked its policy of erasing from voter registration lists people who do not regularly cast a ballot. Under the policy, such registration is deleted if the person goes six years without either voting or contacting state voting officials.
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide on a Trump-backed Ohio voting rights policy that has disenfranchised thousands of American voters by using lists to purge names of those who vote infrequently.
"The right to vote is so fundamental that Congress wanted to make sure people can continue to exercise it even if they don’t exercise it in every election," said Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer at Demos, the advocacy group that represents Harmon, the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless. "People have the right not to vote as well as the right to vote."
“The use of the immigration databases are inaccurate, discriminatory and inappropriate for voter list maintenance. We know that it results in inaccurate purging of eligible voters,” said Katherine Culliton-González, a lawyer at think tank Demos who represented plaintiffs challenging Florida’s method of striking people from the rolls.
"Countless Ohioans have been denied their right to vote as a result of these purges," said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney for Demos, which is among the organizations challenging Ohio's law. [...]
But national voting rights and civil rights activists said the commission and Trump's call for new laws is just a pretext to suppress voter participation particularly among the poor, the elderly and people of color.
“I’m thrilled that the commission has been disbanded, but also will definitely keep an eye on what it is that these players will do in the next steps,” said Katherine Culliton-González, senior counsel for Demos, a public policy group.
Demos and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will host a media call to discuss the upcoming Supreme Court oral argument in the case of Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.
“Ohio is the only state that does it based on not voting in a two-year period,” says Dale E. Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which along with the public policy group Demos, is representing Harmon and two Ohio nonprofit organizations. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to assume that most registered voters move every two years.”