Larry Harmon is a software engineer and a Navy veteran who lives in Ohio. Harmon voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but he choose not to vote in 2012 because he says he was unimpressed with the candidates. In 2015 a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana was on the state ballot. Harmon discovered that his name had been struck from the Ohio state voting rolls, thus forbidding his vote on this issue.
In 2011 the state of Ohio sent a mailed note to him, asking him to confirm his eligibility to vote. Harmon did not respond to this notice. In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Court in Cincinnati ruled in Harmon’s favor, stating that Ohio had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
The heart of that lower court’s decision was that failing to vote should not be a trigger for sending a notice.
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In Ohio’s case, the state has set up a punitive system that says if you fail to vote in a single federal election cycle and you get a notice and you do not respond, then your name is purged from the rolls.
The League of Women Voters said it best in a brief before the Supreme Court: “Ohio is the only state that commences such a process based on the failure to vote in a single federal election cycle. Literally every other state uses a different, and more voter protective, practice.”
Now. the villain in this particular case is Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. He defends his view by saying: “Ohio removes registration only if they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a notice.” Alito seems to be saying that if you don’t respond to one notice, then punitively the government can throw you off the rolls and eliminate your right to vote.
That is patently wrong and unfair....
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