The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to go forward with removing around 1,600 non-citizens from its voter rolls after two lower courts ruled in favor of the Biden-Harris Department of Justice’s request to block the commonwealth’s voter roll purge.
A majority of the Supreme Court granted Virginia’s request for a stay on a U.S. District Court’s order, with liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson saying they would’ve denied Virginia’s request.
The Supreme Court ruled that the lower court’s decision is “stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought.” The court added that the stay would “terminate automatically” if writ of certiorari is denied.
“We are pleased by the Supreme Court’s order today. This is a victory for commonsense and election fairness. I am grateful for the work of Attorney General @JasonMiyaresVA on this critical fight to protect the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens,” Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin posted on social media. “Clean voter rolls are one important part of a comprehensive approach we are taking to ensure the fairness of our elections.”
State officials argued that the lower court’s injuction harm “Virginia’s sovereignty, confuse her voters, overload her election machinery and administrators, and likely lead noncitizens to think they are permitted to vote, a criminal offense that will cancel the franchise of eligible voters,” CBS News reported.
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Virginia filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit kept in place a ruling from a Biden-appointed District Court judge who ordered the commonwealth to keep non-citizens on its voter rolls. Youngkin blasted the lower courts’ rulings, saying, “It’s commonsense: noncitizens shouldn’t be on our voter rolls.”
Youngkin issued an executive order in August to ensure that officials checked voter roll data daily and matched it up with data from the DMV, which resulted in around 1,600 non-citizens being removed from Virginia’s voter rolls. The voter roll purge was challenged by the DOJ along with groups of private organizations, which argued that the 90-day “quiet period” before an election required in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 ensures that legitimate voters aren’t removed by bureaucratic error.
In previous district court decisions, however, the 90-day deadline in the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 has been interpreted to mean that a state is prohibited from removing a voter from the rolls “based on a change in the residence of the registrant,” not from removing non-citizens.
