Supreme Court Permits Virginia to Remove Suspected Noncitizens from Voter Rolls.

Supreme Court Permits Virginia to Remove Suspected Noncitizens from Voter Rolls.

A divided Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to implement a program that state officials say is aimed at removing suspected noncitizens from its voter registration rolls, siding with Republicans in one of its first significant decisions tied to next week’s election. 

Even though Virginia isn’t a battleground state, both the program and the legal fight took on sharply political overtones as Trump and other Republicans have fueled false narratives about widespread voting by noncitizens. At issue are about 1,600 voter registrations that Virginia said came from self-identified noncitizens but that a US District Court said hadn’t been fully vetted for citizenship status. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, in August that required election officials to take more aggressive steps to match residents who self-identified as noncitizens at the Department of Motor Vehicles against voter rolls and to purge those matches. Youngkin on Wednesday called the Supreme Court’s order a «victory for common sense and election fairness.

The state’s voters, he said, «can cast their ballots on Election Day knowing that Virginia’s elections are fair, secure, and free from politically-motivated interference. The Biden administration and voting rights groups sued and a US District Court concluded last week that at least some eligible US citizens had their registrations culled under the program. Those opposed to the program relied on a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, which bars states from making «systematic» changes to voting rolls within 90 days of a federal election. The Biden administration said that Youngkin’s order created exactly that kind of systematic program within the so-called «quiet period» mandated by the federal law.

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Virginia argued that the quiet period prohibitions applied only to eligible voters, not noncitizens. None of the lower court orders blocked the state from making individual eligibility assessments, or from ultimately knocking noncitizen voters off the rolls, nor gave noncitizens the right to vote in federal elections. In their emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, Virginia election officials relied in part on a still-developing legal theory that warns federal courts against making last-minute changes to the status quo of voting rules before an election. Virginia argued that the federal district court violated that principle by pausing the program.

Virginia’s opponents countered that that option would not solve the issue for purged voters who planned to vote absentee, unaware their registrations had been cancelled and that it risked confusion at polling places – particularly if poll workers weren’t adequately prepared to deal with the scenario. Because the Supreme Court offered no explanation for its decision, it’s not clear which of Virginia’s arguments were persuasive.

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