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.
