Voter purges are a great tragedy in the American electoral landscape. One way this is happening is State officials in Ohio deciding to wipe out voters who have “sat out too many elections” from voter registration lists. This means that eligible voters who may not have exercised their right to vote for some time would be taken off registration rolls.

It is one’s choice to vote whenever s/he chooses to. It is not up to State or elections officials to determine how frequent voters should do so. Eliminating voters from registration rolls in Ohio may lead to disenfranchisement as some victims may effectively decide to vote subsequently only to find that they do not have their names on the roll.

Ohio Democrats are taking the issue seriously. They are fighting voter purge by Secretary of State Frank LaRose with a lawsuit. Catherine Candisky has written about this story in The Columbus Dispatch.

Ohio Democrats filed a lawsuit Friday attempting to stop Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s plan to remove more than 200,000 voters from registration rolls next week for sitting out too many elections.

State Democratic Chairman David Pepper said that after recent revelations showing “thousands of errors in voters purged … it makes no sense for the secretary of state to push forward with the purge.”

He added, “These problems need to be looked at more thoroughly.”

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The 17-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus seeks a restraining order blocking the Sept. 6 purge and asks that LaRose be ordered to conduct “a manual review of the voting history of each voter at risk of being purged.”

Attorneys for Democrats said LaRose “increased the risk that eligible voters have been, and will be, unlawfully removed from the Ohio voter file in a manner that prevents them from casting a regular ballot, by knowingly and intentionally relying on an inaccurate purge list and then exacerbating the risk by scheduling the purge to take place immediately prior to” primary elections being held in some jurisdictions Sept. 10.

See full story here.