- The Supreme Court of the United States has reinstated the decision of Virginia to purge approximately 1,600 alleged noncitizens from its voter rolls.
- The move is backed by Governor Glenn Youngkin, but is opposed by voting rights organizations and the Biden administration.
- The decision is part of ongoing debates on immigration and election integrity, with legal battles still in progress.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld Virginia’s decision to remove about 1,600 individuals from its voter rolls ahead of the Nov. 5 election. These individuals were deemed by state officials to be noncitizens. However, the Biden administration and voting rights organizations argue that actual citizens were also removed.
The Supreme Court justices on Wednesday overturned a judge’s order from Oct. 25 that required Virginia to reinstate the voting registration of the affected individuals. Noncitizens are not permitted to vote in U.S. federal elections. On Aug. 7, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin announced a new policy to remove individuals from Virginia’s official voter registration list who could not verify their citizenship. This would be achieved through daily data sharing between state agencies.
The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, saw its three liberal justices dissent from Wednesday’s action.
Youngkin praised the court’s decision on an initiative he characterized as a “vital battle to safeguard the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.”
“This is a triumph for common sense and election integrity,” Youngkin stated.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ruled that Virginia’s “systematic program” of voter list maintenance was in violation of federal law as it occurred too close to the election.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who is running against Democrat Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election, has made his anti-immigrant stance a key part of his campaign. He and his supporters have alleged, without providing evidence, that a large number of noncitizens could vote in the election. Research has shown that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.
With Harris leading Trump in Virginia according to opinion polls, the state is not considered a key battleground that could determine the outcome of the presidential race. However, with immigration being a major issue in the campaign, legal battles over voter list purges in Virginia and Alabama involving suspected noncitizens have garnered attention.
Youngkin announced his policy less than three months before the election, stating that the voter-roll maintenance program would “scrub the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved and non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register.”
Virginia already had a mechanism in place to remove noncitizens from its rolls, but Youngkin’s executive order increased the frequency of data sharing between government agencies from monthly to daily and clarified that the process would continue as the election approached.
At least 18 U.S. citizens were erroneously removed from the voter rolls since the new policy was implemented, according to voting rights groups including the League of Women Voters of Virginia that filed a lawsuit on Oct. 7 in federal court challenging the purge. The U.S. Justice Department filed a similar challenge four days later. The cases were consolidated.
The challengers argued, among other things, that Virginia’s voter roll purge violated a 1993 federal law called the National Voter Registration Act that contains a so-called “quiet period provision” barring states from the “systematic” — as opposed to individualized — removal of people on voter lists within 90 days of an election.
A systemic approach, they argued, risks mistakenly purging valid voters — including naturalized citizens whose state Department of Motor Vehicles documents are outdated — with too little time to correct errors before Election Day.
Of the roughly 1,600 people removed from Virginia’s voter rolls since Aug. 7, about 600 had indicated to the DMV that they were not U.S. citizens, according to Virginia’s filing to the Supreme Court. The other 1,000 had presented documents to the DMV showing they were noncitizen residents and were later identified as noncitizens through a federal database, the state’s filing said.
Those who were flagged for removal were first notified and given 14 days to affirm their citizenship before being taken off Virginia’s list of registered voters, the state said.
Giles, a Biden appointee, on Oct. 25 preliminarily blocked Virginia from enforcing its policy and ordered the state to restore to the voter registration of the roughly 1,600 people.
Trump called the judge’s ruling “a totally unacceptable travesty” and said the Supreme Court “will hopefully fix it.”
The Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 27 refused to revive Virginia’s policy, prompting the state’s emergency filing to the Supreme Court.
Agree
Agree – ensuring accurate voter rolls is crucial for protecting the integrity of our elections.
Good grammar and punctuation, Disagree – Removing alleged noncitizens from the voter list can disenfranchise eligible voters and suppress voter turnout.
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