Bennett Guess, director of the ACLU of Ohio

Bennett Guess, director of the ACLU of Ohio, speaks at the Athena Cinema Tuesday about voter suppression, as well as OU’s interim speech policy. 

 Photo by Conor Morris

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio’s executive director spoke to a crowd of nearly 100 students, faculty and community members Tuesday about voter suppression in America and Ohio, as well as Ohio University’s controversial “Freedom of Expression” policy.

J. Bennett Guess, executive director of the ACLU of Ohio, said during the talk at the Athena Cinema that Ohio Secretary of State John Husted has been engaged actively in purging people from the voter rolls in Ohio, an effort that Guess contends disproportionately impacts economically disadvantaged people of color (who typically vote Democratic).

Husted, a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch in 2016 that the purge of voters his office performs is done in accordance with state and federal laws, and argued that those purged are “deceased voters” or “people who have moved out of state.” His office said it removed 465,000 deceased voters and 1.3 million “duplicate registrations.”

Guess, however, had a different perspective on the issue. “As we speak, the ACLU is challenging a shockingly wide-ranging practice in Ohio: the purge of perfectly eligible but infrequent voters… by removing people from the voting rolls so that they cannot vote,” he said.

Guess added that it’s a practice that actively disenfranchises people in “huge numbers” without even knowing it’s happening to them. If an Ohio voter misses a single federal election, he explained, the state sends a “little postcard” (just once) asking the voter to update his or her address. If the voter doesn’t respond, and then continues to not vote for four more years, he or she is removed from the voter rolls without any additional notice. Guess charged that “millions of Ohioans have been purged” through that process.

“There are many reasons why people don’t vote, and in our view at the ACLU, they don’t even need a reason,” Guess said. “We encourage people to vote, but the right to vote is not something that you use it or lose it.”

He added that the practice disproportionately penalizes poor and seriously ill residents, as well as those without access to transportation.

Guess charged that Ohio’s voting purge practices violate the law, in particular, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which he said made it “very clear” that non-voting could not be used as a mechanism for removing people from the voting rolls. As such, the ACLU of Ohio has filed a lawsuit against Husted, which has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Guess said he expected oral arguments to begin in early January.

TO SEE MORE ON GUESS’ comments about OU’s “Free Expression” policy, see article here.

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