Supreme Court Upholds Controversial Ohio Voter-Purge Law

June 11, 201810:30 AM ET
 Nina Totenberg

Updated 11:19 a.m. ET

By a 5-4 margin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a controversial Ohio voter-purge law.

It's known as the "use-it-or-lose-it" law, and it's the most aggressive voter-purge system in the country. The state currently strikes voters from the registration rolls if they fail to vote in two consecutive elections — and if they fail to return a mailed address confirmation form.

Those challenging the law said it violated the National Voting Rights Act, which says that a state cannot strike someone from the rolls for failure to vote. The emphasis is to get more people to vote — and not have them purged.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion with the court's other conservatives signing on. The first line of the opinion lays out evidence for why Alito sees the need to clean up voter rolls.

"It has been estimated that 24 million voter registrations in the United States—about one in eight—are either invalid or significantly inaccurate," Alito writes, citing a Pew Center on the States study. "And about 2.75 million people are said to be registered to vote in more than one State."

This was the same study that incoming Trump White House officials cited — misleadingly — to make the case that voter fraud was occurring and immigrants in the U.S. illegally were voting.

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https://www.npr.org/2018/06/11/618870982/supreme-court-upholds-controversial-ohio-voter-purge-law