Why are Republicans so determined to discourage people from voting? -WaPo

[StrictlyRockers]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ohios-voter-roll-purging-may-be-legal-that-doesnt-mean-its-right/2018/06/11/743c1cb4-6db3-11e8-bd50-b80389a4e569_story.html

Why are Republicans so determined to discourage people from voting?



THE SUPREME COURT on Monday upheld an Ohio law that allows state officials to purge voters from voter registration lists for dubious reasons. This is now a case of the law permitting one thing and common sense recommending another. Just because states can prune voting rolls the way Ohio has does not mean they should.

Ohio identifies voters for purging if they have failed to vote for two consecutive years, then it sends them a card asking if they are still living in the same place. If they fail to return the card and fail to vote for another four years, their names are struck from the rolls.

The National Voter Registration Act, also known as the motor voter law, forbids states from using nonvoting as the basis for removing a voter from the rolls. But the court majority found that states may use voter inactivity as “a rough way of identifying voters who may have moved,” as long as failing to vote is not the only criterion they use. Because Ohio also sends a card to registrants who have not voted for two years before purging them, the court found that the state satisfied the law’s requirements.


In a dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer lamented that Ohio’s policy “erects needless hurdles to voting” in a manner inconsistent with the intention of federal law to enable participation in the nation’s democracy. Though Ohio does not make nonvoting the sole criterion for removing a voter from the rolls, it does use it as the sole criterion for singling out voters for potential purging. A “person’s failure to vote is the sole basis on which the State identifies a registrant as a person whose address may have changed and the sole reason Ohio initiates a registered voter’s removal,” Mr. Breyer wrote. He continued, A “registrant who fails to vote in a single federal election, fails to respond to a forwardable notice, and fails to vote for another four years may well be purged.”

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[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Why? Because when people don't vote, the Republicans win.

Their voters always turn out, so by tamping down the numbers of Democratic voters, they can and often do, win.

[Meadowoak]

2. It's the only way they can win, to keep Democrats from the polls. Republicans will crawl through

Broken glass to get to the polls and they vote EVERY time the polls open.

[Volaris]

3. Cause they've known for 2 decades if we all show up they'll lose their ass.