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It’s Not Disenfranchisement If You Do It to Yourself
On June 11, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of states like Ohio, saying they can purge voters from their voting rolls if those voters do not exercise their right to vote. On Twitter, Slate Writer Mark Joseph Stern, along with other critics, called the ruling a “massive blow” to voter rights and a disenfranchisement of minority voters.
Stern engages in selective editing of the statute cited in the majority opinion. While the statute says failure to vote is, on its own, not a reason to remove voters from the rolls, Ohio law uses failure to vote as a way to identify voters who may have moved out of the district. It then mails them a card to confirm their address. If the voter fails to return that card and does not vote for four more years, they are then purged from the voting rolls. This is cited in the opening of the majority opinion. Ohio argued this was necessary to clean up voter rolls and, yes, prevent possible voter fraud.
Stern and others say this unfairly targets “low-income and minority” voters, despite the fact it gives those voters six years and government contact to address the issue and remain on the rolls.
The left continually plays the “disenfranchisement” card, despite being on the wrong side of issues such as voter ID (an issue a majority of minorities support, too). And they ignore that most municipalities have ample absentee and early voting opportunities for citizens who wish to exercise that right. In Milwaukee, for example, the population is 57.4% Black or Hispanic, 36% white (per the US Census Bureau). Over 28% of the population lives in poverty. Yet not only does Milwaukee have absentee voting (ballots can be requested by mail, fax, e-mail, or in-person), they also have early voting (“in-person absentee”). For the Spring 2018 election (held April 3), the city had open voting from March 19-30, 8:00 am – 4:30 pm Monday-Friday, and on Saturday, March 24, from 10:00 am – 2:00 pm. That gave voters 11 days to cast an in-person absentee ballot prior to election day, when the polls are open from 7:00 am – 8:00 pm, and doesn’t count the time available to mail in an absentee ballot.
Additionally, Wisconsin — along with states like Tennessee and South Carolina — offer free IDs to voters. There is no cost to the voter to obtain an ID to vote. None. Even the most indigent person can obtain one. Never mind that IDs are required for a slew of other activities. If you are poor, many municipalities require a photo ID for obtaining benefits like food stamps. They’re required for obtaining employment, purchasing alcohol and cigarettes, traveling, opening bank accounts, and many other activities of daily living. Yet we never hear about people being disenfranchised in these areas.
Voting, yes, is a right. Yet it comes with limits — you must, for example, vote in the municipality where you live. I cannot attempt to vote in an election in Chicago and claim I’m being “disenfranchised” when I am not allowed to submit a ballot. Voting is also worthy of protection against fraud and abuse because voting is the process by which we elect those who make laws that impact us — our jobs, our homes, our income, and the laws by which we must abide.
When you choose not to exercise that right, and choose not to respond when the government tries to verify you are eligible to vote in the municipality where you once did, being removed from the voter rolls is not “disenfranchisement.”
Published in Elections
No perpetual flame for these voters in Chicago. Perpetual ballots for Chicagoans’, even in death they still do their civic duty.
The argument on the other side effectively read the statutory safe harbor, which Ohio “follow[ed] … to the letter,” out of the statute.
If I were a minority, I’d be offended that the average Democrat thinks I’m too stupid to get an ID.
Too narrow a ruling, IMHO.
Frankly, I’m surprised at how much leeway Ohio gives derelict voters. What would happen if states required voters to re-register every year? I’d go for that.
Number one, very good article, Amy. Your logic is unassailable. Number two, I see you’re a brand new member. Welcome to Ricochet! Number three, I don’t know if you’ve discovered that from time to time members will host a Ricochet Meetup so members can meet each other in person. Most meetups are an evening get-together, but a few times a year someone will get ambitious and put one together for a whole weekend. As it so happens, a weekend meetup is going to take place in Milwaukee, July 27-29. You can read about it here.
Have you no regard for such Chicagoan traditions as “Vote early, vote often.”?? And “being dead is a lame excuse to avoid the duty of casting a ballot.”??
I’d call that unnecessarily burdensome. “Registering” does mean interacting with a government bureaucrat, which means it’s time consuming and unpleasant. Would you like it if they made you reapply for a driver’s license every year? I’m perfectly happy to have people who continue to vote with some regularity in a precinct remain on the rolls. But given the reality that people move, and die, and don’t have the courtesy to notify voter commissions when they do so, the state does need some means of expunging people who are likely no longer eligible from their rolls. “Haven’t voted in a while” seems to me like a perfectly reasonably reason to put somebody on the “might no longer be eligible” list, and then checking in by mail seems a perfectly reasonably way of giving that voter the opportunity to say “no, leave me on, I’m still here.” I don’t see a problem with this Ohio plan, but I don’t agree that we need to make voting a huge pain for everybody as your proposal would.
Not to mention increasing the work load of the bureaucracy in question thus requiring higher budgets and more employees.
I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but our county voter registration office and our local DMV are pretty efficient. Even if they weren’t, I’d be willing to put up with the extra hassle if 1) it keeps people from voting illegally, and 2) it gets idiots off the road.
But you’re right. Ohio’s law makes perfect sense, but I wish the court’s ruling had a little wider margin.
I live in Chicago. Renewing a DL is a full day exercise.
Apparently California is similar.
@stad Federal law says you can’t take someone off the rolls just for not voting. Federal law also says you can remove them if you follow Ohio’s procedure or one like it.
As I said above, the dissenters would read the statutory safe harbor out of the statute. Their beef, as Justice Alito suggests, is with Congress.
Those are the ones who apparently elected JFK in 1960.
It wouldn’t matter what you think. What matters is what the Democrats think you should think.
You should move to where I live, then. It’s a lot safer, and you can get your license renewed in short order. OTOH, summer is mostly a competition between the temperature and the humidity, each one trying to get higher than the other.
When I went to get a tag for my new car, I was in and out of the DMV in ten minutes. Of course, it depends on the time of day and date of the month.
Believe it or not, I really like living in Chicago. It’s a great city with much to do. And perfectly safe if you live in the right parts of it. But on the government front, both city and state, it’s borderline hopeless. When you talk to people about the question of leaving it’s more a question of “when” rather than “if.” Like we’re holding back a tide that we know is eventually going to overwhelm us.
All of our big cities are great in their own way, in spite of Democrat rule in the majority of them. I often wonder if it’s because the Dems keep the nastiness confined to certain neighborhoods (or should I say, ‘hoods and be called racist?).
Think how Baltimore took a nose dive when the mayor and police chief (IIRC) allowed the nastiness into the Inner Harbor area, which is a big tourist spot. The same thing is happening to London.
A former law partner of mine has a lifelong friend who’s a fairly senior official in the Chicago Police Department. After a few drinks one night this officer confided in me that the CPD knew full well who was paying their salaries, and who we were paying them to protect us from. That was the way they viewed their jobs. I think it’s more a matter of socio-economics than race per se, but in Chicago as in many places, the two are correlated such that what results looks a lot like a “thin blue line” protecting the “white” (now read: white, mixed with Asian, Indian subcontinental, and educated black and Hispanic) neighborhoods from the chaos that reigns in “minority” neighborhoods (which are, in fact, mostly black and Hispanic in Chicago and characterized by family breakdown and poor to non-existent education). We’ve made some progress on the race front – represented by the fact that what we used to call “white” neighborhoods, the socio-economically successful areas, actually have a fair amount of skin color diversity now either due to immigration or the successful efforts of some non-whites to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” But that’s the best that can be said. However incomplete the racial segregation, there’s still a lot of it, and the police still mostly protect the mostly white from the mostly non-white.