Virginia's governor has vowed to fight back after a judge ordered government and election officials to stop purging voters and to reinstate hundreds of names deleted from the rolls.
District Court Judge Patricia Giles issued a preliminary injunction Friday after civic groups and the Department of Justice said the names were removed too close to an election, violating federal law, as reported by WVTF.
The executive order signed by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin was intended to remove alleged noncitizens from voter rolls, however the National Voter Registration Act states that names cannot be removed within 90 days of an election, as reported by WRIC.
Giles ordered more than 1,500 names to be reinstated after ruling that the removal process was not done on an individual basis as Youngkin's administration asserted.
"All of the eligible voters who were wrongfully purged from the voter rolls will now be able to cast their ballots," Ryan Snow, an attorney who represented some of the advocacy groups in the lawsuit, said in a statement to WVTF. "No one should mess with a citizen's right to vote."
Youngkin said that Virginia plans to appeal the decision immediately as his executive order was signed Aug. 7, exactly 90 days before Election Day. The governor also argued that his order reinforced a state law from 2006.
"Let's be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls," Youngkin said in a statement obtained by VPM News.
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