Ohio’s Voter Purging Process Is About Disenfranchising Cities

There are two key things to understand about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Husted vs APRI decision yesterday, which allows the state to punish infrequent voters by purging them from voter lists.

At question in this case is the state’s Supplemental Process for purging voters, which goes like this: If you live in Ohio and you decide to, for whatever reason, skip voting in one federal election, this can trigger the state to send a document to your listed residence asking you to confirm that you still live there. If you do not send this document back and don’t vote for another few elections, the state assumes you no longer live at this address and will remove your name from your local voter list. This means that the next time you decide to vote, you will likely not be able to—or at best, you can vote provisionally. This is what happened to Navy veteran Larry Harmon when he tried to vote in 2015 but was denied because he failed to vote in 2009 and 2010 and didn’t respond to the address confirmation mailer that was sent to him.