The statutes at issue are the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The text of the statutes offers a conflict between two values: first, the right of every eligible citizen to vote without unreasonable or discriminatory state obstacles, and, second, the need for accurate voter rolls “purged” of those who have died, lost the right to vote by criminal conviction, or moved away. No matter how that conflict is resolved, policy is in the house.

Ohio adopted a means of “purging” that, from the available evidence, leans sharply in the direction of voter-removal and gives less weight to the danger of inaccurate purging. The predictable result is that many Ohioans who should vote will not be allowed to; the other equally predictable result is that a disproportionate number of them will be poor or members of minority communities. The third predictable result is that disfranchisement of those voters will aid the Republican Party and disadvantage their opposition, the Democrats.

But of course Alito cares naught for that; he is—remember—engaged in value-free textual interpretation, you see. You got a policy beef, hoss, take it up with Congress.

The problem with that claim is that—as the two dissents point out—Congress has stated the policy it would prefer in the application of twin federal statutes at issue in Husted. Section 2 of the first of them, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, in fact includes a long section on “findings and purposes,” which says, in part, that the act is designed to “increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote” and enable voting officials at every level to enhance “the participation of eligible citizens as voters in elections for federal office.” The “purposes” section also provides that the act should “protect the integrity of the electoral process” and “ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.”

These purposes require officials, and reviewing courts, to strike a balance. Too much leniency could lead to inaccurate rolls. Too much security could strip the franchise from eligible citizens.

To Alito and the majority, the postcard-return method is a kind of Goldilocks compromise. The dissent argued that it violates not only the purposes but the very text of the statute.

Here’s how the Ohio system works. If a voter misses a federal election, the voter is flagged as possibly having moved. The state then sends a postcard asking the voter to return it if he or she is still eligible at the old address. If the voter returns the card, that’s it. But if not, the name stays flagged—and if the voter then does not vote in either of the next two federal elections, the voter’s name is purged.

Not only common sense but statistical surveys show that most people who receive such governmental postcards don’t return them—either because they don’t understand the legalese they bear, or because they mean to and forget, or because they just lose the card. In his dissent, Breyer cited figures showing that, in 2012, Ohio sent roughly 1.5 million postcards—and got back only about 235,000 replies. Justice Breyer’s dissent notes that Ohio’s system in 2012 used the combined failure to vote and the failure to return a postcard to begin the “purge” process for more than 1 million voters. If not returning a postcard meant the voter has moved, this suggests that nearly 13 percent of Ohio’s population had moved in the previous two years. But, he noted, “the streets of Ohio’s cities are not filled with moving vans.” In fact, it seems likely that at most a third of that number had actually moved, he said.