Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute
The Court upheld Ohio's practice of sending address-confirmation notices to registered voters who haven't voted in two years, and then removing those who don't respond to the notice and don't vote for four more years.
The ruling settles a nationwide dispute over how aggressively states can use inactivity to trigger voter-roll purges, giving other states a green light to use similar notice-and-wait systems without running afoul of federal voter-registration law.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled for Ohio; the Sixth Circuit reversed and sided with the challengers; Ohio's Secretary of State asked the Supreme Court to review the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Ohio identifies voters who haven't cast a ballot in two years and mails them a postage-paid card asking them to confirm their address. Voters who don't return the card and then don't vote for four more years are removed from the rolls as presumed movers. Voting-rights groups and an Ohio resident sued Ohio's Secretary of State, arguing this process illegally uses nonvoting as the basis for purging eligible voters.
The question before the Court
Can Ohio use a registered voter's failure to vote as one factor in a process that eventually removes that person from the voting rolls for moving?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that Ohio's process is lawful because it never removes anyone for nonvoting alone. Federal law's Failure-to-Vote Clause only forbids states from treating a person's failure to vote as the sole reason for removal; it doesn't stop states from using nonvoting as one piece of evidence, combined with a failure to respond to a mailed confirmation notice, that a voter has likely moved away.
Ohio's system requires both a lapse in voting and a failure to return a postage-paid notice card, followed by several more years of nonvoting, before anyone is removed. Because federal law's own notice-and-wait procedure treats that same combination as sufficient grounds for removal, the Court found Ohio's approach consistent with, rather than in violation of, the statute.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Millions of voters across the country could be removed from registration rolls if they skip voting for a period, fail to respond to a mailed notice, and then skip several more elections. States with similar 'use it or lose it' registration-maintenance systems can now use nonvoting as a trigger without a separate, independent showing that a voter has actually moved.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision resolving the statutory question, so Ohio's Supplemental Process remains in effect and other states may rely on similar systems. The Sixth Circuit's judgment blocking Ohio's process is reversed. The ruling does not foreclose separate legal challenges based on discriminatory impact under a different provision of the same law, which the plaintiffs here did not raise.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Ohio's process, or similar state programs, produce a discriminatory impact on particular communities; that separate provision of federal law, which bars discriminatory removal programs, was never raised as a claim in this case and remains open for future challenges.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas agreed with the majority's statutory reading but added that the challengers' interpretation should also be rejected because it would raise serious constitutional doubts. He argued the Constitution gives states, not Congress, the exclusive authority to set and verify voter qualifications, so reading federal law to bar states from using nonvoting as evidence would improperly interfere with that state power.
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“Nothing plus one is still one.”Breyer's argument that adding an unreturned notice to nonvoting adds no real evidence a voter moved.
Justice Breyer argued Ohio's process violates the law because it uses a voter's failure to vote as the sole trigger for identifying people as likely movers, and the mandatory confirmation notice does not add real evidence since most people who receive such notices, movers and non-movers alike, simply don't respond. He also argued the process is not a 'reasonable effort' to remove only ineligible voters, since nonvoting has little tendency to show someone actually moved.
Dissent — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor joined the principal dissent in full but wrote separately to stress that Congress enacted the law against a historical backdrop of states using nonvoting-based purges to disenfranchise low-income and minority voters. She argued the majority's reading ignores that history and upholds a program that amici say has disproportionately removed minority, low-income, disabled, and veteran voters from the rolls.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court read the federal voter-registration law's 'Failure-to-Vote Clause' together with a separate provision, subsection (d), that expressly lets states remove a voter who both ignores a mailed confirmation notice and then fails to vote for about four more years.
- Because Congress could not have meant the general ban on removing people 'by reason of' nonvoting to cancel out the specific procedure it wrote in subsection (d), the Court concluded the ban must mean something narrower: it forbids using nonvoting as the sole and only reason for removal.
- Applying ordinary causation analysis, the Court ruled out reading 'by reason of' as meaning any contributing cause or even a foreseeable cause, since either reading would make subsection (d)'s notice-and-wait process itself illegal; only a 'sole cause' reading avoided that contradiction.
- A later clarifying amendment, which said no one may be removed 'solely by reason of a failure to vote,' confirmed this sole-cause reading and showed Congress intended nonvoting to be usable as one factor among others.
- Because Ohio only removes a voter after both a failure to respond to the notice and years of continued nonvoting — never nonvoting alone — the Court held Ohio's process fits within what the sole-cause reading permits.
- The Court also rejected arguments that Ohio needed independent, reliable evidence a voter had moved before sending the notice, holding that the law leaves states free to pick any uniform, nondiscriminatory trigger for sending confirmation notices, including nonvoting.