The Bill of Rights has been a central touchstone for Americans throughout history, especially when faced with existential challenges to the legitimacy of American government.
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.
"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.
“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.”
There are specific reforms that could help black families. Standardizing same-day voter registration across states would benefit communities of color, which face disproportionate barriers to civic participation.
“Compared to any other democracy in the world, we have some of the lowest numbers in terms of participation and turnout,” Katherine Culliton-Gonzalez, a senior counsel for the think tank Demos, told WhoWhatWhy. [...]
The ACLU and public policy organization Demos, have filed a lawsuit against Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), for violating the NVRA “when he purged voters based on their failure to vote,” a ACLU press release read in part.
For several years, Demos and our partners have been working to fulfill our Constitution’s democratic promise by forging a new legal order that is open to money-in-politics reforms, and marshalling the factual and legal arguments that could help the Court move in this direction.
Katherine Culliton-González is senior counsel at Demos(the people), a New York-based nonpartisan, nonprofit voter-rights group active in litigating voting issues, including Pennsylvania’s voter ID law, ruled unconstitutional in 2014.
“Pennsylvania has a history. And it continues to create barriers to the ballot,” she says, “from lack of language access to a lack of poll worker training, no early voting. It not only complicates voting but it sets up real barriers to voters.”
According to a 2012 policy paper from the nonprofit public policy research organization Demos, Maryland and New York implemented their laws after the 2010 census, and both have withstood federal court challenges; Delaware and California's laws will take effect with the next census.
Conservative groups and Republican election officials in some states say the poorly maintained rolls invite fraud and meddling by hackers, sap public confidence in elections and make election workers’ jobs harder. Voting rights advocates and most Democratic election officials, in turn, say that the benefits are mostly imaginary, and that the purges are intended to reduce the number of minority, poor and young voters, who are disproportionately Democrats.