Voting rights advocates fear that counties carrying out aggressive purges under legal duress will push officials to purge eligible voters. "In a lot of these settlements, the push to remove people from the rolls may result in a lot of mistakes," Cameron Bell, an attorney for the liberal think tank

The groups have stepped up their game, and more recently have targeted counties and states known to play crucial roles in elections. They also began attracting the attention of major voting rights groups like Demos and the League of Women Voters, which sought to intervene in the lawsuits and help

But the A. Philip Randolph Institute, an African-American trade union group, the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, and Larry Harmon, a man who was purged from the rolls, are suing the state over the law.

The Justice Department released an amicus brief in the case, currently before the Supreme Court, over whether Ohio can continue to remove “infrequent voters” who fail to cast a ballot over a six-year period.

Ohio’s law allows the state to eliminate from voter rolls any registered voter who has not shown any “voting activity” in the last six years.

The Trump Justice Department is undermining the ability of people to vote, said Brenda Wright, the vice president of policy and legal strategies at Demos, which is representing the plaintiffs in the Ohio case.

The Department of Justice abandoned a principled position that it has held for decades through three presidencies. By reversing course and choosing to stand with Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted and his practice of purging countless eligible Ohioans from the rosters, the DOJ has confirmed many

“We got involved in this case because we’re concerned that overly aggressive efforts to purge voters off the rolls result in removing eligible people, something we’ve seen happen in other states, including Ohio and Georgia.”

Larry Harmon, 60, hadn’t voted in a while when he drove to the high school in November 2015 to weigh in on a local referendum in Kent, Ohio. But he wasn’t allowed to cast his ballot. [...]

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted filed his opening brief in Husted v. Ohio A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI)—a case that will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming term. The case addresses Ohio’s Supplemental Process, a practice that targets voters who fail to vote in a two