Purge the rolls and start from square one.
Via Cleveland Com:
Sixty-one-year-old Portage County resident Larry Harmon showed up to vote in 2015 only learn his registration was canceled.
Harmon hadn’t cast a ballot since the 2008 presidential election because he saw abstention as a way to express his dismay with politics. But the Navy veteran who works as a computer consultant didn’t realize infrequent voting would trigger Ohio’s process to remove him from the voting rolls. And he wasn’t happy.
Harmon complained to Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office. Eventually, he joined a legal challenge that contends Ohio’s method of purging inactive voters amounts to voter suppression and unfairly targets vulnerable groups, such as low-income and minority voters.
The U.S. Supreme Court will rule on the legality of Ohio’s process after hearing arguments from both sides on Jan. 10. A federal court rejected Ohio’s vote culling procedures in 2016, and Husted appealed. While the case worked its way through the courts, an injunction let more than 7,500 voters cast 2016 presidential ballots that would otherwise have been disqualified under Ohio’s system.
The process at issue is triggered by not voting during a two-year period. Registration is canceled if the voter does not cast a ballot during the next four years or update his or her address. Repeated notices are sent to voters whose registration has been flagged.
Critics say voters often mistake those notices for junk mail, and 80 percent ignore them. They say many infrequent voters have problems making it to the polls, and Ohio’s purge process puts another hurdle in place to disenfranchise them. They say that like Harmon, many voters first learn their registration has been canceled when they show up to vote and are turned away.
“Countless Ohioans have been denied their right to vote as a result of these purges,” said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney for Demos, which is among the organizations challenging Ohio’s law.
Husted argues the current process ensures accurate, up-to-date voter rolls. He says his efforts removed nearly 560,000 dead people from the rolls and resolved the cases of more than 1.65 million Ohio voters with multiple registrations. Proper voter roll maintenance means that fewer Ohioans have trouble casting ballots, and more ballots are counted, Husted says.
Husted, a Republican, says Ohio’s procedure has been in place for more than two decades, and was administered the same way by both Republican and Democratic secretaries of state.
“This case is about maintaining the integrity of our elections, something that will be harder to do if elections officials are not able to properly maintain the voter rolls,” said a statement from Husted.