Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-980_f2q3.pdf
Page Number: 2.0

2 

HUSTED v. A. PHILIP RANDOLPH INSTITUTE 

Syllabus 

may be removed solely by reason of a failure to vote.”  §21083(a)(4)(A) 
(emphasis added). 
  Respondents  contend  that  Ohio’s  process  for  removing  voters  on 
change-of-residence grounds violates this federal law.  The Ohio pro-
cess at issue relies on the failure to vote for two years as a rough way 
of identifying voters who may have moved.  It sends these nonvoters 
a  preaddressed,  postage  prepaid  return  card,  asking  them  to  verify 
that they still reside at the same address.  Voters who do not return 
the card and fail to vote in any election for four more years are pre-
sumed to have moved and are removed from the rolls. 

Held:  The  process  that  Ohio  uses  to  remove  voters  on  change-of-
residence grounds does not violate the Failure-to-Vote Clause or any 
other part of the NVRA.  Pp. 8–21. 

(a) Ohio’s  law  does  not  violate  the  Failure-to-Vote  Clause.    Pp. 8–

16. 

(1) Ohio’s  removal  process  follows  subsection  (d)  to  the  letter:  It 
does  not  remove  a  registrant  on  change-of-residence  grounds  unless 
the  registrant  is  sent  and  fails  to  mail  back  a  return  card  and  then 
fails to vote for an additional four years.  See §20507(d)(1)(B).  Pp. 8–
9. 

(2) Nonetheless,  respondents  argue  that  Ohio’s  process  violates 
subsection (b)’s Failure-to-Vote Clause by using a person’s failure to 
vote  twice  over:  once  as  the  trigger  for  sending  return  cards  and 
again  as  one  of  the  two  requirements  for  removal.    But  Congress 
could  not  have  meant  for  the  Failure-to-Vote  Clause  to  cannibalize 
subsection (d) in that way.  Instead, the Failure-to-Vote Clause, both 
as originally enacted in the NVRA and as amended by HAVA, simply 
forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a regis-
trant, and Ohio does not use it that way.  The phrase “by reason of” 
in  the  Failure-to-Vote  Clause  denotes  some  form  of  causation,  see 
Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., 557 U. S. 167, 176, and in con-
text sole causation is the only type of causation that harmonizes the 
Failure-to-Vote Clause and subsection (d).  Any other reading would 
mean that a State that follows subsection (d) nevertheless can violate 
the Failure-to-Vote Clause.  When Congress enacted HAVA, it made 
this  point  explicit  by  adding  to  the  Failure-to-Vote  Clause  an  expla-
nation of how the clause is to be read, i.e., in a way that does not con-
tradict subsection (d).  Pp. 9–12. 

(3) Respondents’  and  the  dissent’s  alternative  reading  is  incon-
sistent with both the text of the Failure-to-Vote Clause and the clari-
fication  of  its  meaning  in  §21083(a)(4).    Among  other  things,  their 
reading  would  make  HAVA’s  new  language  worse  than  redundant, 
since  no  sensible  person  would  read  the  Failure-to-Vote  Clause  as 
prohibiting  what  subsections  (c)  and  (d)  expressly  allow.    Nor  does