# Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute **Status: stub — expand.** **584 U.S. ___ (2018), decided 11 June 2018, 5–4, Alito writing** for Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Gorsuch, reversing the Sixth Circuit. The Court upheld Ohio's use of **two years of non-voting as the trigger to mail** the change-of-residence confirmation notice required by 52 U.S.C. § 20507(d)(2), and the subsequent removal of registrants who neither returned the card nor voted across the following two federal general elections. **The decision turns on one word in the statute.** § 20507(b)(2) provides that a list-maintenance program "shall not result in the removal of the name of any person ... by reason of the person's failure to vote," and then, in the same paragraph, expressly permits a state to use the subsection (c) and (d) procedures against a registrant who has neither responded to the notice nor voted during the specified period. Alito read the prohibition as reaching only removal **solely** by reason of non-voting: Ohio "does not strike any registrant solely by reason of the failure to vote," because it removes "only when they have failed to vote and have failed to respond to a change-of-residence notice." **Why it is structurally load-bearing.** The prohibition on removal for failure to vote is the only absolute federal command in American list-maintenance law, and after *Husted* it is satisfied by adding a piece of mail. Non-voting becomes the **sensor** rather than the **ground** — and it is the cheapest and broadest sensor available, aimed at precisely the registrants least likely to return a card. See [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]], Part C. Expand with: the Sixth Circuit opinion below, Breyer's and Sotomayor's dissents, the Ohio Supplemental Process in operation and the numbers it produced, the post-2018 spread of inactivity-triggered notices to other states, and the interaction with [[Help America Vote Act]] § 303. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-09 ASCII map build for [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]]. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[How a Voter Is Removed From the Rolls]] · [[Inactive Voter]] - [[National Voter Registration Act]] · [[Help America Vote Act]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]]