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Trump Admin on Your Right to Vote: Use It or Lose It
Cheaters gonna cheat, every way they can!http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/trump-administration-on-the-right-to-vote-use-it-or-lose-it/
The Justice Department backed Ohio’s effort to purge voters who sat out a few elections.
Ari Berman --- Aug. 8, 2017
The Trump administration redoubled its support on Monday for efforts to remove people from voter registration rolls, siding with the state of Ohio in a case that could allow states to cancel registrations for voters who fail to cast a ballot over the course of several elections.
The Justice Department released an amicus brief in the case, currently before the Supreme Court, over whether Ohio can continue to remove “infrequent voters” who fail to cast a ballot over a six-year period. One of those voters, Larry Harmon, is a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by Demos and the ACLU of Ohio. The 60-year-old software engineer and Navy veteran voted in 2008 and then returned to the polls for a local referendum in 2015, only to find that he was no longer registered, even though he hadn’t moved or done anything else to change his status.
The brief is not the administration’s first action that could lead to voter purges. On June 28, the same day President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission asked for sweeping voter data from all 50 states, the Justice Department sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking them how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Vanita Gupta, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, called the letter “virtually unprecedented” and “a prelude to voter purging.”
In the Ohio case, a federal appeals court ruled in September that that state had violated the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that made it easier to register at the DMV and other public agencies and stipulated that voter-roll maintenance “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters registered to vote in an election for Federal office by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” As a result of that ruling, 7,500 people who would have otherwise been purged were able to vote in the 2016 election, including Harmon.
The Obama administration backed that position, but the Trump administration has now reversed course. ..............
The Justice Department released an amicus brief in the case, currently before the Supreme Court, over whether Ohio can continue to remove “infrequent voters” who fail to cast a ballot over a six-year period. One of those voters, Larry Harmon, is a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by Demos and the ACLU of Ohio. The 60-year-old software engineer and Navy veteran voted in 2008 and then returned to the polls for a local referendum in 2015, only to find that he was no longer registered, even though he hadn’t moved or done anything else to change his status.
The brief is not the administration’s first action that could lead to voter purges. On June 28, the same day President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission asked for sweeping voter data from all 50 states, the Justice Department sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking them how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Vanita Gupta, the head of the department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, called the letter “virtually unprecedented” and “a prelude to voter purging.”
In the Ohio case, a federal appeals court ruled in September that that state had violated the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that made it easier to register at the DMV and other public agencies and stipulated that voter-roll maintenance “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters registered to vote in an election for Federal office by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” As a result of that ruling, 7,500 people who would have otherwise been purged were able to vote in the 2016 election, including Harmon.
The Obama administration backed that position, but the Trump administration has now reversed course. ..............
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