Nearly 30,000 voters who were purged from the rolls in Lucas County a year ago may have to be reinstated — depending on the decision of a federal judge in Columbus.

With the start of early voting just 10 days away, officials are waiting for directions from the U.S. District Court in Columbus.

A federal appeals court ruling on Sept. 23 came down hard on Ohio’s process for clearing the names of ineligible voters from its registration lists.

The ruling suggested that Ohio is purging inactive voters based on something as random as whether they had hiked to the top of the world’s tallest mountain.

“A state cannot avoid the conclusion that its process is triggered by a registrant’s failure either to vote or to climb Mount Everest or to hit a hole-in-one,” wrote Circuit Judge Eric Clay of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. 

Judge Clay was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

The ruling overturned a decision of the District Court in Columbus.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said the ruling meant that he will have to put the names of dead people back on the voter lists.

The case was brought by the A. Philip Randolph Institute and the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.

Roughly 2 million voters, 400,000 of them last year, have been purged from the rolls since 2011.

Lucas County used the “supplemental process” in August, 2015, to remove 28,381 voter names of people who had not exercised their right to vote since 2008 — the election in which former U.S. Sen. Barack Obama beat U.S. John McCain to become the 44th president.

It is possible that the names of people who have died could be added back to the rolls if all the purged names are reinstated, said Gina Kaczala and LaVera Scott, the Republican director and Democratic deputy director of the Lucas County Board of Elections.

That’s because under the state’s so-called supplemental process, the board of elections is not always notified when voters die or move out of Lucas County, so their names remain as eligible voters.

“Some of those people could have been dead and that’s why they didn’t vote,” Ms. Scott said. “Maybe they died in another state.”

Instructions awaited

The court agreed that Ohio’s process of purging people from the voter registration rolls is based on their failure to vote often enough, calling that a violation of the National Voter Registration Act.

The Ohio Democratic Party hailed the decision as a “huge win for Ohio voters and voting rights generally.”

”The Court found that Secretary of State Jon Husted has spent years purging Ohio voters ... in clear violation of federal law. Given this ruling, Husted should immediately restore active status to thousands of voters who have been illegally purged and stop wasting taxpayer money defending unlawful practices that violate voting rights,” Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said.

Mr. Husted has pushed back on the court’s decision and is waiting for the court’s remedy before deciding whether to appeal.

Mr. Husted said he made a significant concession to the plaintiffs after the case was filed, but the court found the “supplemental process” to be illegal.

A requirement stated that the voters who were contacted about their failure to vote were to respond with a personal identification number, such as their Ohio driver’s license number or their Social Security number. That requirement was abolished, and now the voter just has to return the signed and dated postage-paid card.

Also, in the court’s opinion, the notice did not adequately inform voters that they would lose their registration if they did not respond. The new confirmation notice details the six-year process that would result in them losing their voter privileges if they fail to respond.

Mr. Husted said he’s waiting to see what the court’s remedy is, if the court will order the reinstatement of all purged voters.

“If the final resolution requires us to reinstate voting eligibility to individuals who have died or moved out of Ohio, we will appeal,” Mr. Husted said.

“In the past, Ohio has seen situations where there were more people in some counties on the voter rolls than were actually eligible to vote; this undermines voter confidence and opens the door to fraud,” Mr. Husted said.

State Rep. Kathleen Clyde (D., Kent), said the state has other ways of identifying deceased voters and said Mr. Husted is using a “red herring” to distract from his real intent.

“Tens of thousands of people who are alive and interested in voting were illegally purged under his direction,” Ms. Clyde said.

She agreed that many of those purged were people who registered in 2008 to vote, largely in response to aggressive voter registration drives by the Barack Obama campaign.

“It’s a lot of this rising American electorate who came out of the woodwork and were energized to vote in 2008, and the GOP has been on a relentless march to cut back on the rights of that rising American electorate. This purging is one of the ways that it’s made it harder for people who are not maybe the stalwart, die-hard voters but whose rights are equal to everyone else’s to vote in our elections,” Ms. Clyde said.

Voter purge standard

Mr. Husted said the ruling overturned 20 years of practice in Ohio, which included four years under a Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner.

Joshua Eck, spokesman for Mr. Husted, said the process is designed to identify voters who have died or moved but who are not weeded out by other processes.

Ohio has two methods of removing ineligible voters from its active voters list: when it gets notifications from the National Change of Address database maintained by the U.S. Postal Service and when it carries out its “supplemental process.” 

The elections board can cancel a voter’s registration if they receive notice through the change-of-address process, which remains in place.

In addition, local elections boards can cancel the registrations of people who are adjudicated as mentally incompetent, are sentenced for a felony, or who die in Lucas County.

But if people move out of Ohio, no official notification could be sent to Ohio, even if the voter dies or reregisters in another state because elections boards have no nationwide registry they can access.

“Because there’s no countrywide database, we can’t track when people move,” Ms. Scott said.

Under the supplemental process, if a person fails to vote in a two-year period including a federal election, the voter is sent a confirmation notice that they are in danger of having their registration canceled. 

If the voter does not send back the confirmation card, then fails to vote over the next four years, or takes any other action to identify themselves as active voters — including signing a voter petition — the person can be purged.

So the purge in 2015 was aimed at removing people who voted last in 2008, but not in 2010, 2012, or 2014. Nor did they notify in any other elections or sign a petition or notify the elections board of their continued interest in remaining an active voter.

Under federal law, people cannot be removed for failing to vote. 

Ohioans claim they were removed for failing to respond to the confirmation notice, an argument the appeals court rejected.

Checking your status 

The number of voting machines the county maintains and the number of paper ballots that are printed is determined by the number of eligible voters: the more voters, the more machines and paper ballots that have to be paid for. 

Also, a large number of inactive voters swelling the registration list makes the turnout percentage look lower than it really is.

Anyone who hasn’t voted since 2008 should check with the Secretary of State’s Office or their county board of elections before Oct. 11, the deadline to register to vote for president on Nov. 8.

As of the end of last week, Lucas County had 296,864 voters, which includes 17,717 newly registered voters since Jan. 1. 

In the 2008 election, Lucas County had 317,036 registered voters.

Contact Tom Troy: tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058 or on Twitter @TomFTroy.

First Published October 3, 2016, 4:00 a.m.