CLEVELAND -- Any law or government action, no matter how well-meaning or airtight it might seem, will bring out certain members of society who will immediately begin trying to figure out how to get around it, or use it to their advantage.
Such it has been with the election system that has been the hallmark of our democracy.
Our history is peppered with efforts to subvert the voting process - by paying people to vote a certain way, recruiting the residents of cemeteries to the voting rolls, figuring out ways to cast more than one ballot, or, of course, by trying to prevent certain segments of people from voting through onerous means of poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, or just plain thuggery.
That has produced two ongoing and opposite, and all too often competing, governmental functions: the responsibility to make sure that any eligible person who wants to vote, can - but only once, and then only after being properly registered in his or her municipality of residence.
The need to ensure the first half of that has led to energetic legislative efforts, most notably with the groundbreaking National Voting Rights Act of 1965, followed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
More recently came the Help America Vote Act in 2002, in the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco, in which voters in Florida couldn't figure out how to punch their ballots. (One wonders if the next step will be the Take Voters By The Hand And Help Them Into The Voting Booth Act, but that's another discussion.)
On the other side of the ledger have been attempts by the various states to make sure that while we are concentrating on removing barriers to voting, the election process remains free of fraud and follows the law.
Unfortunately, and for reasons we can only guess at, such attempts are often resisted on the Democrat side of the aisle. Democrats customarily punctuate that resistance by accusing the evil Republicans of trying to suppress voters' rights, particularly in minority communities that typically vote Democrat.
It was just such a wrangle in which Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted found himself, after his efforts to follow a decades-old procedure for cleaning up the state's voter rolls spawned a lawsuit from two advocacy groups and an Ohio voter that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Court ruled last week in Ohio's favor, but only by a 5-4 margin - the usual 4-4 liberal-conservative split, with Justice Anthony Kennedy swinging over to the conservative side for this one.
The legal issues involved took the Court 58 pages to untangle, and are far beyond the scope of this column - but it is instructive to consider what the people who are unhappy with the decision had to say about it.
Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown: "... today's decision empowers Ohio to further strip away the right to vote for thousands of Ohioans, threatening the integrity of our state's election process .... This ruling further shows why we can't afford to pack our federal courts with judges who have a track record of hostility towards Ohioans' most basic right."
Democrat Rep. Marcia Fudge: "All of us, including our highest court, should be doing everything we can to make sure people CAN vote, not allowing their right to vote to be stripped away. As usual, the decision will hurt the poor more than anyone."
Freda Levenson of the American Civil Liberties Union: "Marginalized populations remain extremely vulnerable to state-sanctioned voter suppression and disenfranchisement, and we will continue to fight to uphold the rights of eligible voters in the 2018 midterm elections, and beyond."
So what awful thing has Ohio done to the voters in minority and poor areas?
Under the longstanding procedure, which has been followed by both Democrat and Republican administrations, if a person does not vote for two years, he or she gets a postage-paid, pre-addressed card in the mail from the elections board. The card instructs the voter to return it as proof of continued residence, warning that failure to vote in the next two federal elections - four years - will result in removal from the registration rolls.
Husted says that over the years this process and his other efforts have removed nearly 560,000 dead people from the rolls and resolved the cases of more than 1.65 million Ohio voters with multiple registrations.
How this disenfranchises minority voters is a mystery. If you haven't voted in two years, you've got to read a card that's mailed to you and return it. If you don't do that, you've got four years to vote again, or re-register. How is that more difficult in poor communities than in others? Is it really a hardship for minorities or poor people to find a day sometime in a six-year period to ensure they're registered to vote?
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, "Our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals, regardless of race, income, or status, to exercise their right to vote." (For good measure, she also included the disabled and veterans in her list of abused voters.)
But even more, our democracy rests on the ability of all individuals who vote to exercise their ability to think. That's the only thing that complying with this state election law requires, and one that transcends race, income, physical infirmity and military status.
It is an insult to all the above to suggest otherwise.
Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
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