The Supreme Court won’t require Virginia to restore 1,600 names the commonwealth removed from its voting rolls in advance of next week’s elections, stopping lower-court rulings that found Virginia had violated federal law by removing voter registrations within 90 days of the elections.
The 6-3 order Wednesday from the court did not explain the reasoning for reversing lower-court rulings so close to the elections. Virginia officials had argued that they had simply followed commonwealth law to remove noncitizens from the registration rolls.
However, the lower court found that Virginia’s process hadn’t actually checked whether each voter was actually a noncitizen and that the purge of supposed noncitizens actually removed the registrations of eligible voters.
The trial court found that Virginia likely violated a provision of the National Voter Registration Act which requires that states not remove registrations in the 90 days prior to an election.
The Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees voted together, and its three Democratic appointees would have kept the lower-court order in place.
Former President Donald Trump, the current Republican nominee for president, has sought to highlight the immigration and voting issue as a theme for the election. Without evidence, he has stoked on social media and in a presidential debate the idea that Democrats were looking to add noncitizens to voting registration lists.
Some congressional Republicans pressed this fall for Congress to pass legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and require states to remove noncitizens from their official lists of eligible voters.
Wednesday’s order reverses decisions by a federal trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that did not pause the lower-court ruling and meant Virginia had to restore those registrations ahead of the election.
In their emergency application to the Supreme Court, state officials argued that they had removed the voting registration of noncitizens who had told the state Department of Motor Vehicles they were not citizens or whose citizenship status was verified in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements federal database.
State officials claimed that putting the 1,600 names back on the rolls would “confuse her voters, overload her election machinery and administrators, and likely lead noncitizens to think they are permitted to vote, a criminal offence that will cancel the franchise of eligible voters.”
The Biden administration and civil rights groups defended the lower-court ruling, arguing that Virginia’s actions were exactly the type of last-minute purge the federal law was meant to prevent.
In a Supreme Court filing, the government pointed out that the state’s broad matching of alleged noncitizens to voting registrations had also purged the registration of citizens from the rolls and left them little time to fix the problem.
“This case involves a violation of the Quiet Period Provision that resulted in the conceded removal of eligible citizens from Virginia’s voter rolls,” the government response said.
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