Left apoplectic because SCOTUS let Ohio remove people from voter rolls who never vote anyway

Is there anyone worth voting for in Ohio anyway? Whaddaya mean? John Kasich! You’re making my point for me. The liberal wing of the Supreme Court is waxing indignant today because its colleagues in the majority have decided to let stand an Ohio law that removes people from the voter rolls if they a) have not voted in six years; and b) have failed to respond to a subsequent warning that they’ll need to verify their continued residency in order to remain registered to vote.

---

You’d have to be pretty disengaged to meet both of those sad qualifications, and perhaps Democrats figure anyone that out of it has to be for them. But it’s an awfully strange fight to have – defending the voting rights of people who never vote anyway. And really, it’s not as if anyone was putting an obstacle in their way when they were registered. The purpose of the law is to ascertain if people who have gone that long without voting might have, in fact, moved out of the state. If you haven’t voted in six years and you don’t respond to a request to simply verify you’re still around, why should anyone shed a tear for the loss of your voter registration? (Especially when there’s nothing stopping you from going back and registering again.) But you know the left:

Justice Stephen Breyer penned an 18-page dissent for the liberal wing of the court, marking the sixth time this term the four liberals have dissented as a bloc. Rather than focusing on messy voter rolls, he recited the history of literacy tests, poll taxes and other restrictions he said were designed to “keep certain groups of citizens from voting.” Breyer noted that most voters simply ignore the warning notices, leaving their failure to vote as the principal cause for being purged from the rolls. The number who don’t vote or return notices far exceeds the number who actually have moved, he said. “The streets of Ohio’s cities are not filled with moving vans; nor has Cleveland become the nation’s residential moving companies’ headquarters,” Breyer said. Rather, Ohio’s process “erects needless hurdles to voting of the kind Congress sought to eliminate.”

---

---

I think the left is racist

This is comical. The law doesn’t erect any hurdles to voting for people who have the slightest interest in voting. All it does is take a cue from voters who never vote and don’t even bother to confirm that they still live in the state. The story excerpted tries to portray this as a big advantage for the GOP because low voter turnout supposedly helps Republicans. But how much difference does it make when you lop people off the voter rolls who never vote? This seems like a perfectly reasonable attempt to keep the voter rolls cleaned up while making it easy for legitimately registered voters to keep voting. There was also the standard complaint that this “disparately affects minority voters,” but I don’t see how unless the left thinks minorities never vote and can’t be bothered to tell you they’re still around. And if that’s what the left thinks about minorities, then I think the left is racist.

---