On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ripped the Supreme Court’s decision to rule in favor of the “Use it or Lose it” voter registration process, saying it would “disenfranchise” voters.
But as Dan McLaughlin pointed out in a comprehensive piece at National Review, the court’s narrow 5-4 decision in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute only resolved a narrow point of federal statutory law:
The Court was not asked to decide if states are allowed to purge names from the voter rolls. Federal law requires them to do so. That law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, was written by congressional Democrats, passed with the votes of every single Democratic senator and 238 of the 252 Democrats in the House at the time (including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Steny Hoyer, and James Clyburn) and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
McLaughlin concluded:
In reality, purges of inactive voter registrations are necessary to maintaining fair and honest elections, and when they actually had responsibility for writing federal laws on the subject, Democrats recognized that … It’s always worth investigating these things, but the immediate leap to assume partisan conspiracies is misguided; while partisan mischief in voting has been going on as long as we’ve had democracy, the fact remains that somebody has to make sure that the voter rolls bear some relationship to the voters, and that will always involve judgments about how best to do it. At the end of the day, the Husted decision is simply one fairly narrow decision about the mechanics of a process that Congress has already decided must be carried out.