The Numbers Don’t Lie: Debunking Ohio’s Rationalization for Discriminating Against Voters Who Miss an Election

UPDATE, 10/21/16: A federal court ruled last night that Ohio must allow most of the purged voters to vote on November 8 by provisional ballot.

UPDATE, 10/20/16: A federal appeals court ruled in September that Ohio is illegally removing voters from the rolls. Despite this ruling, Secretary Husted has yet to restore voter registrations for potentially tens of thousands of citizens in the battleground state before November 8.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted says he has a good reason for targeting voters for removal from the rolls if they haven’t voted in a while.

The problem is, the facts don’t bear him out.

Telling someone that they cannot vote now because they didn’t vote in the past is a time-tested method of voter suppression. In years past, to make it harder for people of color and people in other underrepresented groups to vote, some states required all voters to re-register to vote before every election.

Congress ended this practice when it passed the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) in 1993. The NVRA ensures that registered voters do not have to re-register simply because they missed an election or two. Now, before states and counties may remove registered voters from the voter rolls, they must respect certain safeguards—such as confirming that a voter moved to a new home in a different jurisdiction—that are designed to protect eligible voters’ rights to have their say.

But when one form of voter suppression is taken away, there is no shortage of creativity in finding ways around it. Now, Husted is attempting to flout the NVRA’s protections by using a person’s failure to vote as a supposed indication that the person has moved.

Under Husted’s directives, if a registered voter does not vote in an election or engage in other voting-related activities (like turning in an updated voter registration application) for two years, then Ohio sends that voter an “address confirmation notice.” If the voter does not respond to the notice and does not vote in the next two federal general elections, then the voter will be removed from the voter rolls. If the voter then shows up to vote in an election without re-registering first, their vote will count for nothing.

Maintaining accurate lists of eligible voters is important, and using reliable information that people have moved—like post office information—to start the address confirmation process makes sense. But a major flaw with Ohio’s procedure is that a person’s failure to vote is a terrible indicator of whether they have moved.

Project Vote looked at U.S. census data to see whether people who don’t vote are people who recently moved. The result? It is actually more likely than not that a person who did not vote has not recently moved. In other words, someone’s failure to vote is a completely unreliable and inaccurate way to predict whether they moved.

The data come from the Census Bureau’s Voting and Registration Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is distributed every two years to approximately 56,000 households, which are selected to form a representative sample of the U.S. population. As part of this survey, the Census collects data on both voter turnout and “residential mobility”—that is, the extent to which people move.

The CPS results are strikingly clear: most people who missed an election did so for reasons other than moving. In the 2012 presidential general election, 62 percent of Ohioans who did not vote also reported that they had lived at their present address for at least two years. This rate was 64 percent in the 2010 midterm general election and 62 percent in the 2008 presidential general election. In other words, nearly two-thirds of nonvoters hadn’t moved recently, and the number of nonvoters who stayed at their address for at least two years is greater than the number of nonvoters who had moved.

These trends show that whether or not someone votes in a particular election cannot be taken as evidence that someone has moved to a new home. This should come as no surprise; there are many reasons why a person might not vote in Ohio, such as not being able to travel to the polls. The only mystery is why Ohio’s Secretary of State would assume that a person who misses an election should be treated as a suspect who must prove they did not move—or else. Reasonable efforts to maintain accurate voter lists should never be based on such unreliable and inaccurate assumptions.

Fortunately, Project Vote’s allies Demos and the ACLU of Ohio are leading a charge against Ohio’s purge of nonvoters, and are suing Ohio’s Secretary of State in federal court to stop it. The case is currently on appeal in the Sixth Circuit, and we hope Ohio’s practice of unfairly targeting people who did not vote in an election will be shut down before voters head to the polls this November. Every eligible voter deserves to have their say.