Lucas, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) recently had oral arguments for
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) . The case 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 because they choose not to vote in the past.
Husted v APRI is just one instance of one state targeting voters who chose not to vote in a previous election. Ohio is not alone. States which are hostile to voters — usually those with GOP Governors, Secretaries of States or GOP controlled legislatures — target registered voters who have not voted in a past elections with purges from voter rolls. Some states do so illegally; see North Carolina, and some do so by using the NVRA change of address process as a loophole.
Sign the petition: purging registered voters from voting rolls just because they have not voted in a past election is an affront to our democracy.
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.
If the Supreme Court sides with Husted, and rules voter purges like this
Constitutional, the Motor Voter Act — and voter protections —
will be severely undermined. A bad ruling will lead to more states adopting
this new voter suppression tactic and more and more states turning "red."
We have to insist at the state level that no voter who has, in the past,
exercised their right to not vote can be purged from voter rolls by state
elections commissions .
Sign if you agree: No one should be purged from the voter rolls for not
voting in a past election.
Keep Fighting,
Carissa Miller, Daily Kos
Daily Kos, PO Box 70036, Oakland, CA, 94612.