The Battle for Voting Rights Lives On
It’s not clear who will win, and that’s depressing. Plus, Jonathan Bernstein’s morning links.
Front lines.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The first thing to know about the Supreme Court decision that allows Ohio to purge its voter rolls is that it was a case of statutory construction, not constitutional interpretation. The justices were only trying to figure out what ordinary laws say, not what the Constitution means. See helpful commentary from Bloomberg Opinion’s Noah Feldman, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and election law scholar Rick Hasen, also writing at Slate.
The second thing to know is that the Constitution doesn’t matter here in large part because there is no established constitutional right to vote for Ohio or anyone else to violate.