WASHINGTON, D. C. - Days after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio's process for removing inactive voters from its rolls, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown on Wednesday introduced a bill that would make that process illegal.

Brown - who served as Ohio's chief election official in the 1980s - said his SAVE VOTERS Act would amend the National Voter Registration Act to clarify that states can't use someone's failure to vote or respond to a state notice as a reason to target them for removal from active voter rolls.

The law's goal is to protect voters from voter "purges" that pose serious consequences for those who may be serving overseas, sick, traveling, homeless or otherwise unable to vote on Election Day, Brown's office said.

A statement from Brown said the bill would restore voters' rights and "uphold the integrity of our election process. Special interests already have too much influence in government. We need to make it easier, not harder, for Ohioans to vote and make their voices heard."

Under Ohio's current policy, failure to cast a ballot for two years triggers a process where notices are repeatedly sent to voters whose registration is flagged. Registration is canceled if there's no response to the notices, no votes are cast during the next four years and the voter's address isn't updated.

Organizations that challenged the policy said it disproportionately disenfranchises low-income voters and voters of color, creating another hurdle to people who already have trouble voting. They contended it was illegal under federal laws that ban using voter inactivity as a reason to remove someone from the rolls.

A 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling written by Justice Samuel Alito upheld Ohio's policy. It said that Ohio actually removes voters from the rolls because they've changed residence. Repeated failure to vote and failure to return notices is merely evidence that they've moved, the decision said.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted - who are this year's Republican nominees for Ohio governor and lieutenant governor - had argued before the court that Ohio's process is needed to remove dead people from the voting rolls and resolve the cases of voters who have multiple registrations.

The bill that Brown introduced Wednesday with Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the latest skirmish in a nationwide partisan war over ballot access. Republicans say voter rolls need scrutiny to prevent fraud and promote ballot integrity, while Democrats insist the efforts are meant to reduce turnout from Democratic-leaning groups such as racial minorities.

An analysis by Reuters found Ohio's policy favors Republicans in the state's largest metropolitan areas by removing voters from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods.

Even though Klobuchar is the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees federal elections, the bill the pair introduced is unlikely to gain traction in a legislative body controlled by Republicans.

But it will add yet another battle front to the ballot access war, and give Brown another issue to rally Democrats around as he seeks reelection in November.

A statement from Husted said that Brown's proposal, as presented, would result in the names of "hundreds of thousands of deceased voters and individuals who no longer live in Ohio bloating the voter rolls and compromising the integrity of our elections."

Husted said that when Brown served as a state legislator, he twice voted in favor of legislation to remove voters after just four years of inactivity. The provisions enacted through those bills - which were far more restrictive than the current process - were then enforced by Brown himself while serving two-terms as Secretary of State, said Husted.

"But Senator Brown doesn't want you to know about that," Husted's statement said. "He just wants you to think that for the past 24 years, Democrat and Republican secretaries of state in Ohio have been frivolously removing voters from the rolls - and that's false. The fact is Ohio's process has been in place for nearly a quarter century and includes more time - and more efforts to keep registered voters on the rolls - than anything Sherrod Brown ever thought up, voted for, or enforced during his time in Columbus."

Brown said Husted was wrong. His office said Brown voted for a bill as a state legislator that would have ended all voter purging in Ohio. When Ohio voters later passed a constitutional amendment that required purges of voters who hadn't cast ballots in a consecutive four year period, Brown supported measures that required voters to be notified before their registrations were purged, and that clarified voters shouldn't be purged if they updated their registrations, even if they didn't vote, Brown's office said.

As a U.S. Congressman, Brown said he co-authored "motor voter" law provisions that made it easier for more people to register to vote and was an original co-sponsor of the National Voter Registration Act, which made it against federal law to purge voters for not voting and superseded Ohio's constitutional requirement.

Brown said that Ohio's current voter purging practices "are not where this country should be and where this country was before this crowd took over."