Supreme Court Lets Virginia Purge Voter Rolls for Election (3)

The USSupreme Courtlet Virginia carry out a purge of an estimated 1,600 residents from its voter rolls, dividing along ideological lines in an early test of the role the justices may play in next week’s presidential election.

Over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the court paused a lower court ruling that said Virginia’s bulk cancellation of voter registrations, aimed at removing noncitizens from the rolls, violated a 90-day pre-election “quiet period” under federal law. As is often the case with emergency orders, the court gave no explanation.

Although Virginia isn’t a battleground state, the case revolved around what has become a flashpoint in the presidential race: Donald Trump’s claims of widespread voting by non-citizens, something that researchers and state and local election officials have found is rare. It was also one of the few election-related cases brought by the US Justice Department.

Read More: Virginia Asks US Supreme Court to Allow Purge of Voter Rolls

The Supreme Court order isn’t a final ruling on whether Virginia can execute a similar removal program ahead of future elections. But it means the state won’t have to reinstate removed names and will be allowed to cancel more registrations before Nov. 5 through the program, which was based on citizenship data from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

A voter casts a ballot at a polling location in Fairfax, Virginia.

Photographer: Tierney Cross/Bloomberg

Eligible voters who were dropped from the rolls will be able to re-register and vote on Election Day, voting-rights advocates said.

“The Supreme Court allowing Virginia to engage in a last-minute purge that includes many known eligible citizens in the final days before an election is outrageous,” said Danielle Lang, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, which represented challengers to the removal. “But the voters will decide this election, not the courts.”

The Justice Department expressed disappointment, saying it “brought this suit to ensure that every eligible American citizen can vote in our elections.”

Spokespeople for Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who initiated the purge, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Quiet Period

Virginia was the second state to face pushback in the final weeks of the campaign over its efforts to remove residents suspected of being foreign nationals. A federal judge blocked Alabama’s Republican secretary of state from carrying out the removal of more than 3,000 people from its voter rolls. The state didn’t pursue an immediate appeal.

The legal fight in Virginia turned on whether the cancellation program was “systematic” or based on individualized investigations into a resident’s eligibility to vote. The federal National Voter Registration Act prohibits systematic removals in the 90 days before an election, to protect against eligible voters having their right to vote wrongly taken away without enough time to fix any problems with their status.

The state maintained the program was based on information that individuals provided to the DMV, including checking a box on a form indicating they aren’t a US citizen. The Justice Department and private advocacy groups that also sued argued that the DMV data could be wrong if residents had become naturalized US citizens later or had simply checked the wrong box. They said they had identified names on the list of purged voters who were US citizens.

Virginia’s lawyers acknowledged that there could be errors but argued that the state had a strong interest in ensuring only eligible voters were registered to cast ballots.

The dispute is rooted in an executive order that Youngkin signed on Aug. 7, which was 90 days before Election Day. It required the state’s election office to certify that it had a system to update voter rolls daily, including removing names based on the DMV’s citizenship data. The removal process had been in place for years but typically was carried out on a monthly basis.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, entered the order blocking the program on Oct. 25, and the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals refused the state’s request to undo that order in time for the coming election.

The case is Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, 24A407.

(Updates with reaction starting in sixth paragraph. An earlier version corrected court’s action in second paragraph.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
Zoe Tillman in Washington at ztillman2@bloomberg.net;
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Peter Jeffrey, Elizabeth Wasserman

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