Virginia asked the US Supreme Court to revive the state’s purge of voter rolls in the final days of the presidential contest after lower courts blocked it.
The application filed on Monday pulls the justices into the pre-election legal fray in the fast-moving case. A federal judge late last week held that the program violated a 90-day “quiet period” under federal law, handing a win to the Justice Department and private advocacy groups that had sued over the program ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5.
Over the weekend, the state asked a federal appeals court to intervene but a three-judge panel refused to immediately put the program back into place, agreeing with the district judge that it likely violated US law.
The Supreme Court justices asked for a response from the Justice Department and advocacy groups by Tuesday afternoon. Virginia has asked the court to rule by Tuesday, noting that under the lower court’s order, it must reinstate and notify all of the removed voters by Wednesday.
Evidence produced by the state in the case showed that roughly 1,600 Virginians had their voter registrations canceled under the program since it was announced by Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in August. The effort targets residents suspected of being foreign nationals who aren’t eligible to vote, but the challengers said they had found instances of US citizens who were wrongly removed from the rolls.
Lawyers for Virginia argued in Monday’s application that the injunction blocking the program in the next week will “irreparably injure Virginia’s sovereignty, confuse her voters, overload her election machinery and administrators, and likely lead noncitizens to think they are permitted to vote, a criminal offense that will cancel the franchise of eligible voters.”
Ryan Snow, a lawyer with the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups involved in suing Virginia, said in a statement that they would “urge the Supreme Court to stop this madness and make it clear that it is unacceptable to block eligible citizens from voting.” A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Few cases have reached the US Supreme Court in the final months of the 2024 campaign, a departure from four years ago when the justices fielded a series of fights over how states were administering the election amid the pandemic.
Republicans have made the prospect of non-US citizens voting in this election a central focus of their messaging and legal activity ahead of Election Day, but experts have found that it’s rare. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alabama blocked that state from carrying out a purge of more than 3,000 people suspected of being foreign nationals; the state did not pursue an immediate appeal ahead of November.
The voter removal process in Virginia involves citizenship data compiled by the Department of Motor Vehicles. That information is sent to county election officials, who send cancellation notices to residents. Virginians can protest if they’re US citizens and were wrongly swept up in the program.
The state law covering this program has been in place for years, but Youngkin signed an executive order on Aug. 7 requiring daily updates to the lists of eligible voters, instead of on a monthly basis.
The federal National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from carrying out “systematic” removals of names from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. Virginia argued its process wasn’t “systematic” because it was based on information that individuals submitted to the DMV regarding their citizenship status.
But lower court judges agreed with the Justice Department and advocacy groups that Virginia’s program fell under the prohibition because it based cancellations on automated data matching, as opposed to individualized investigations to confirm that a person is not a US citizen. There could be errors if the purge picked up Virginians who became naturalized US citizens later or who mistakenly checked the wrong box on a form, advocates argued.
The case is Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 24A407.
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