They told me that I wasn't registered to vote anymore.

And I said, well, how can that be?

You know, I just got back from the Army.

And they said, well, we removed you due to inactivity.

Tears started coming out by as being told I wasn't able to vote.

If you can't vote at all in the first place, then how the lines are drawn and how the votes are

allocated may not matter that much.

So, you know, I think of whether or not people can actually access the polls as sort of the

bedrock first issue that's got to be resolved before the district lines and gerrymandering issues come into play.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus Slate's podcast about the law and the courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.

2018 is off to a rollicking start as the president tweets in Kuwait threats at the Justice

Department and at unstable nuclear powers abroad.

But, and I've said this before, I'm saying it again, the 2018 and 2020 elections are only as sure and certain as your

right to vote. And guess what? Voting is not as easy as you may think it is in this country,

thanks to gerrymandering and vote suppression and vote purges and all the kinds of things

that are really, really hard to understand. And we have not talked about enough on this show.

But guess what?

Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case about a purge of the Ohio voter rolls,

which is, please trust me, a morass wrapped in a thicket of gooey statutory interpretation questions.

But that is why we are here on this show.

We are going to help the handful of middle school civics classes who listen to the show and all the rest of us who are not, in fact, voting rights lawyers, to understand why sometimes this technical legal stuff is the path to really crucial constitutional rights.

And to make certain that the technical stuff is crystal clear at the end of this show, we're going to talk to the wonderful Dale Ho.

...