Supreme Court allows Virginia to hit possible non-citizen voters

As is typical in emergency situations, the Supreme Court’s brief ruling did not explain the majority’s reasoning. Three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented, saying they would have rejected Yankin’s request to allow the voter purge.

Ryan Snow, a lawyer for one of the groups challenging the purge, said the Supreme Court ruling ignores federal law prohibiting the removal of registered voters “on the eve of an election.”

The decision “is a blow to the many eligible Virginia voters who were unlawfully purged and now face uncertainty about their ability to cast ballots that have been counted,” said Snow, counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. the statement says.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning in Petersburg, Virginia, Youngkin said he was “very pleased” with the court’s decision, which he said provides “further comfort to the entire Commonwealth that this election will be secure, accurate and reflective of the will of the voters.” “

Youngkin bristled at the suggestion that voters were “stripped” from the voter rolls, noting that eligible Virginia voters can still vote using the same-day registration process even if they are removed from the voter rolls. Such voters will personally sign a certification of their eligibility to vote and then vote in the provisional ballot, which is counted after election officials confirm their eligibility to vote.

With Election Day less than a week away and the presidential race between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris considered close, the Supreme Court increasingly finds itself embroiled in election-related disputes. The legal battles over voting rules are heating up primarily in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada, and judges are likely to be involved in more litigation in the coming days.

Already this week, judges rejected Robert Kennedy Jr.’s request to remove his name from the presidential ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan after he abandoned his independent campaign and endorsed Trump.

In the Virginia case, challengers sued state officials, saying they were making changes too close to the election and – in their attempts to exclude noncitizens – excluding eligible voters based on driver’s license application forms that might have been incorrect or outdated. Fully qualified voters who skipped or ignored the citizenship question on these forms were caught up in the purge, as were those who became citizens years after their first interaction with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the challengers said.

“Everyone agrees that states can and should remove ineligible voters, including noncitizens, from their voter rolls. The only question in this case is when and how they can do it,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, told the judges in court papers.

Across the country, Republicans have backed voting measures in eight states that specify that only U.S. citizens can vote in elections, even though voting by non-citizens is already limited in all state and federal elections. Noncitizens are allowed to vote in school or municipal elections in 19 communities, including Washington, DC.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled against Yankin, saying a federal law known as the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from deleting voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Giles suspended the program until the day after the Nov. 5 election and directed the state to send letters to all 1,600 people removed from the rolls, instruct registrars to reinstate those people and announce that the removal process has stopped.

On Sunday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit unanimously upheld the decision, and Virginia asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday puts Giles’ decision on hold while the trial continues. The case may eventually return to the high court, but not before the election.

The total number of voters affected is unlikely to affect the presidential contest in Virginia, where Harris has a six-point lead among likely voters, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll released last week.