Amicus

The Right Not to Vote

SCOTUS will weigh whether Ohio had the right to purge more than a million voters who sat out elections.

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Sometimes the technical stuff is how you get to the crucial stuff. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Ohio’s voter purge, and the case rests on some sticky statutory interpretation questions. Up to 1.2 million voters may have been purged from Ohio’s rolls after they sat out a couple of elections, and in this episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick does a deep dive into the technicalities of the case. Dahlia and her guests also use this moment to take stock of the state of voting rights in the U.S. Dahlia talks with Mayor Joseph Helle of Oak Harbor, Ohio, a veteran who came home to find he’d been purged from the rolls after not voting while on active duty, and the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho. Ho even cites his favorite Justice Antonin Scalia opinion.

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Podcast production by Sara Burningham.