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James Stroop applied to work the polls in Alabama on Election Day. He got a letter from the state on August 23 that he hoped was a response.
Instead, he was “shocked” to discover that he was being purged from the state’s voter rolls as a “non-citizen”. The 55-year-old was born in Florida and has lived in Alabama for nearly 50 years.
James Cozzad, 49, had been a registered Republican voter and cast his ballot in 2016 and 2020 elections without any issue. He also received a letter from the state: He was being removed from the rolls, for the same reason as Stroop.
“I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” he said in a federal lawsuit against the state. “It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law — just for trying to exercise my right to vote. While I hope it was just a mistake, I think if they were just trying to verify something, they would have done so long before the election. Now I can understand why some people feel as though their vote isn’t worth casting.”
Their stories — detailed in litigation from the Department of Justice and voting rights advocates — are not unique to Alabama. Voting-eligible citizens have been swept up in recent voter purges from Alaska to Texas.
Less than a month after the Justice Department’s lawsuit in Alabama, the agency sued Virginia for a similar effort that has canceled registrations for thousands of voters in the state.
They join thousands of people across the country who have been targeted for removal from state voter databases for allegedly registering as a non-citizen, as part of what civil rights groups fear is a concerted mass disenfranchisement effort.
Most of those purges appear to stem from errors on paperwork at a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles offices, which collect voter registration information.
In Tennessee, more than 14,000 registered voters — many of them citizens — received letters in June telling them their information “matches with an individual who may not have been a United States citizen” at the time they received their driver’s license.
Virginia’s governor Glenn Youngkin has pointed to “illegal” immigration as he boasts about the removal of more than 6,000 names from the state’s voter rolls within two years, despite there being no evidence of non-citizens trying to vote during his term in office.
In Alabama, the state’s Secretary of State Wes Allen is being sued for illegally removing more than 3,200 people from the state’s voter rolls — a mass voter purge that falls within a 90-day “Quiet Period” before Election Day, when states are forbidden from making drastic changes. That leaves only a narrow window for people who were wrongfully targeted to fix a state’s mistake.
The Justice Department’s lawsuit in Virginia similarly argues that state’s efforts “have likely confused, deterred, and removed US citizens who are fully eligible to vote — the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision.”
Right-wing media routinely airs myths about “non-citizen” voting, claims that have been amplified by Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican state officials across the US — dovetailing with the former president’s violent rhetoric around immigration and the US-Mexico border.
“They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in, practically,” Trump said during the first and only debate against Kamala Harris. “And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them into our country.”
Democratic rivals and voting rights advocates fear Republican campaigns are once again setting the stage for challenges to election results by relying on the courts and the court of public opinion to build a spurious body of evidence to undermine the outcome.
And it seems to be working: 52 percent of Americans say they are concerned that non-citizens are voting this year, despite there being no evidence to support the idea, according to polling from NPR/PBS News/Marist.
“These lawsuits are in bad faith. They are not strong on the merits. They don’t have good legal claims. They don’t have good facts,” according to Protect Democracy counsel Anna Dorman.
“Their sole purpose is to use the legitimacy of the court system to launder conspiracy theories and make them feel more legitimate, so that if the election results don’t go the way these people want in November, they have some additional conspiracies to put forward to try to undermine peaceful transfer of power,” she told The Independent.
Protect Democracy has labeled the legal challenges “zombie lawsuits” — dead-on-arrival litigation that has no chance of moving through the courts, but will likely be used to revive bogus claims of fraud in the aftermath of what is chalking up to be a close election.
Litigation from the Republican National Committee, Trump’s campaign and other right-wing groups is once again targeting mail-in ballot deadlines, as well as voters who are legally casting their mail-in ballots from overseas — a group that includes US military service members who are stationed abroad.
Republican groups have filed nearly 100 election-related lawsuits across the US this year alone.
“They’re part of a messaging strategy, not a legal strategy,” according to a report from Protect Democracy policy advocate Ben Raderstorf. “Regardless of whether this legal strategy will get anywhere, in any courtroom, it telegraphs a clear intent to subvert the election if Donald Trump loses.”
Once the results roll in, and those now-challenged voters and ballots start to alter the real-time vote count, right-wing groups will point to what amounts to false evidence to once again cry “fraud,” according to Dorman.
A study of 2016’s election results from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law in 42 jurisdictions found that election officials who oversaw the tabulation of nearly 24 million votes referred only 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting for further prosecution — or roughly 0.0001 percent of all votes cast.
Even the right-leaning think tank Cato Institute reported that “non-citizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”
Meanwhile, voters in eight states this fall will decide whether to explicitly ban non-citizens from voting — which is already illegal. The changes, if supported by voters, would have little if any practical effect, but will likely be wielded as “evidence” by Republican officials as part of their campaign against so-called “non-citizen voting,” critics have warned.
In a statement responding to the Justice Department’s lawsuit, Alabama’s secretary of state Wes Allen said it is his “Constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections.”
Stroop, one of the Alabama plaintiffs wrongfully caught up in the vote purge, believes he once mistakenly marked a box on an unemployment form identifying himself as a non-citizen. That error was corrected two years ago. Yet the secretary of state’s office referred him and others purged from Alabama’s voter rolls for criminal investigation.
“I’m worried that when I apply for a job, a thorough background check will somehow turn up that I was criminally investigated by the state as part of the voter purge, and I’ll lose out on the job opportunity,” Stroop said, according to the lawsuit. “I don’t want to spend my time dealing with a criminal investigation, being interrogated by law enforcement, or trying to find a criminal lawyer to deal with any negative repercussions from being wrongly placed on Secretary Allen’s list.”
