I'm sure. ;-)
TheAtlantic:
Several are suggesting that Sotomayor is telling people how to get the Ohio rule struck down again.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
TheAtlantic:
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.
[...]
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.
Several are suggesting that Sotomayor is telling people how to get the Ohio rule struck down again.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.