Rather than condemning Ohio, they should be praised for bringing transparency to the process (as long as the mistakes are corrected).
The tactic here is voter disenfranchisement. It's a tried and true tool of the Republicans and has been around since forever.
The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. Those thousands can _easily_ be achieved, however, with sloppy aggressive and unnecessary purging.
I wish there existed the political will to issue "citizen ID" cards (or other mechanisms) to all citizens, like they do in civilized countries. These could be used for residency and authentication for voting, banking, taxes, and other functions. This authentication mechanism would instantly remove the phony concern of voter fraud amongst republicans while not disenfranchising voters.
You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered.
I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2].
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations"
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.
If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best).
No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place.
Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.
Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot.
The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons.
Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots.
The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID.
Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.
We call them passports :)
The problem is they're out-of-reach financially to many people ($145~) and they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
I am thinking of something akin to the Chinese Resident Identity Card, which does track enough info to determine voter eligibility, I think.
We also have passport cards, which is the credit-card sized version of the passport, and only works for travel to Mexico/Canada (but is still a national ID).
>they can't be used with a database to determine the person's local residence.
You know, I can Google my name and get my current address out of public databases (TruePeopleSearch, etc).
I can also see my current address on the voter record from the website by entering the VoterID number.
The passports have numbers. These can be used to pull/check the address from a voter record database. It's less than trivial.
The address itself doesn't have to be on the ID.
TL;DR: issue passport cards for free to all citizens, force the states to let anyone with such a card to vote with a federal law.
It's doable, but it's certainly not trivial. And no, it's not just "a slip of paper" it's far more than that when you consider all the human, bureaucratic and technical infrastructure, systems and support that would have to be behind it.
Sure, there are trashy and unreliable online aggregators like mylife and their ilk that can provide all kinds of dubious info. I am talking about something much more rigorous and reliable.
There are steps in the right direction occuring now (like Real ID) but even these half-measures have been years in the making and have years to go.
I've considered that, and nope, still trivial
SELECT address FROM voter_addresses WHERE passport_number = {number}
If you were referring to the cost of the passport itself - yes, it requires infrastructure, and this is exactly what the taxes are for. It's an essential component of being a citizen, the extra fees are highway robbery.
> SELECT address FROM voter_addresses WHERE passport_number = {number}
Besides, if those checks showed that a large number of people were included in the purge for demonstrably wrong reasons, it would be prudent to assume that a lot of additional purges would also be suspect.
A reasonable process would do a spot-check, discover that they are horrifically off, and then implement a second-level check.
It means that nobody has found errors... Yet.
Transparency and community engagement (through advocacy groups) helps ensure that valid voters are kept on the voter rolls. Don't knock Ohio for trying to take steps in the right direction.
While it's true that we should have voting roles and ensure only people who are in the state should vote etc, that's absolutely not what people are doing or talking about when implementing voting systems. When the Republican party talks about these ideas, the end goal is skewing the voter turnout in their favor.