So here is the conundrum. Let’s suppose your local board of elections reviews its records and finds that you haven’t voted for two years in a row. They decide you may have moved, or died, and so they send you a notice asking you to notify them whether you still belong on the rolls. No answer; so they remove you from the voting rolls without further notice—as you discover only when, regaining your enthusiasm for politics, you show up at the polls four years hence.

This is precisely what happened to Larry Harmon, a Navy veteran who has lived at the same address near Akron, Ohio, for 16 years. He voted in 2008, but was disgusted by his choices in 2009 and 2010. When he showed up at the polls in 2015, he was turned away—on the grounds that election officials had sent him a notice in 2011 which he did not return (and which, he says, he doesn’t remember getting) and that he had not voted soon enough thereafter.

So the question is, was his registration canceled as a “result” of failure to vote—or solely as a “result” of failure to answer the notice?

Harmon, and advocacy groups supporting him, say the purge of his registration “results” from the failure to vote, which set off the notice, which resulted in his removal. Speakers of non-lawyer English, I suspect, would tend to agree. The state of Ohio, defending its voter-purge process, says the word in this context has a special lawyer meaning. “Result” in the statute, they say, doesn’t mean “result” in the Edmund Burke sense. True, Harmon’s failure to vote was one cause of the purge, but they say the statute requires a different kind of result, called by lawyers—but nobody else in the world—proximate cause. This term—the scourge of first-year tort law students, is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “[a] cause that is legally sufficient to result in liability.” That’s a wonderfully circular term; to establish liability, a plaintiff must prove the defendant’s actions were the “proximate cause” of the harm. And we know whether they were the “proximate cause” when the court finds liability. In the real world, what the phrase usually means is, “Yes, the event wouldn’t have happened without whatever I did, but for some other reason I’d like you to ignore that.”

Here’s the reason why the dispute matters. Two federal statutes, the National Voter Registration Act, passed in 1993, and the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, both touch on the issue: NVRA says that state registration purges “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person from the official list of voters … by reason of the person’s failure to vote.”

HAVA says that “no registrant may be removed solely by reason of a failure to vote.” It then says that the state may remove a voter if the voter doesn’t respond to a notice and “then has not voted” in two or more federal elections in a row.