The Supreme Court today rejected a challenge to one of the practices used by Ohio to remove voters from the state’s voter rolls. By a vote of 5-4, the justices agreed that the practice under question – which cancels the registration of voters who do not go to the polls and who then fail to respond to a notice – does not violate federal laws governing voter registration. The decision could mean that more states will adopt similar laws to trim their voter rolls, particularly when (as the majority observed today) roughly one in eight voter registrations is “either invalid or significantly inaccurate.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the ruling in her dissent today, predicting that it could have a disproportionate effect on the poor, the elderly and minorities.

The case arose when U.S. Navy veteran Larry Harmon went to his local polling place in Ohio to vote in 2015. Harmon learned that, although he had lived in the same place for more than 16 years, he had been removed from the voter rolls because he had not voted in 2009 and 2010 and then also had not responded – because he said he didn’t remember receiving it – to a notice that the state elections board had sent him in 2011 to confirm his eligibility.

Here’s how the Ohio system works. If a voter misses a federal election, the voter is flagged as possibly having moved. The state then sends a postcard asking the voter to return it if he or she is still eligible at the old address. If the voter returns the card, that’s it. But if not, the name stays flagged—and if the voter then does not vote in either of the next two federal elections, the voter’s name is purged.

Not only common sense but statistical surveys show that most people who receive such governmental postcards don’t return them—either because they don’t understand the legalese they bear, or because they mean to and forget, or because they just lose the card. In his dissent, Breyer cited figures showing that, in 2012, Ohio sent roughly 1.5 million postcards—and got back only about 235,000 replies. Justice Breyer’s dissent notes that Ohio’s system in 2012 used the combined failure to vote and the failure to return a postcard to begin the “purge” process for more than 1 million voters. If not returning a postcard meant the voter has moved, this suggests that nearly 13 percent of Ohio’s population had moved in the previous two years. But, he noted, “the streets of Ohio’s cities are not filled with moving vans.” In fact, it seems likely that at most a third of that number had actually moved, he said.

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After Breyer’s textual exegesis, it fell to Justice Sonia Sotomayor to point out that the decision will have predictable real-world consequences: “Congress enacted the NVRA against the backdrop of substantial efforts by states to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters, including programs that purged eligible voters from registration lists because they failed to vote in prior elections.” The majority opinion, she wrote, “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”

The implication—which, given the state of American politics in 2018, is hardly outlandish—is that the Ohio system will hit these voters hardest because, well, that’s what it was designed to do. And the twin statutes at issue, Sotomayor noted, forbid “discriminatory” applications of their provisions.

Depending on where you live, county election officials might diligently remove thousands of voter registrations each year, documented by detailed records. Or they might insist they haven't followed through with the state-ordered process in some years, or apologize for tossing those files years ago, according to an Enquirer / USA Today Network investigation, in which Ohio reporters contacted all 88 county board of elections.

While nearly every county was happy to discuss what local officials call the "voter purge" process, the records they provided were a morass of half-kept data and confusing spikes in removed voters. And the numbers they sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission weren't much better.

At best, these records reveal a lack of care by some election officials tracking voters taken off the rolls.

At worst, they point to a system of removing voters that's far from uniform – meaning where you live could determine when, or if, your voter registration is deleted. And that could affect whose votes count, and whose don’t, in a critical battleground state that may determine the next president.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, insists counties are removing voters from the rolls in a uniform manner across all 88 counties.

“Everyone is being removed by the same standard statewide," Husted said. "There is not a variance between county to county.”

But he doesn't have a number for how many people were removed either. Husted doesn’t know whether that figure has increased or decreased over the 20-plus years the state has removed voters this way. His office does compile how many warning notices are sent to people who might be removed: more than 4.6 million notice since 2011. Some of those people are taken off the rolls if they don’t respond to the notice or vote in the following four years.

One of the most notorious purges took place in Florida in 2000, when the state used a faulty list of felons to remove more than 1,000 legitimate voters from the rolls.