Virginians plan to vote after discovering they were wrongly removed from the rolls

FALLS CHURCH, Virginia. — Phoebe Taylor was fully prepared to vote in Tuesday’s election. She even knew the number of her station in the city of Richmond by heart.

So it came as a shock when a reporter told a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Britain that she had been removed from Virginia’s rolls along with about 1,600 other people over the past two months in an attempt to stop noncitizens from voting.

“It annoys me,” Taylor, 26, said. “I wouldn’t even know.”

Taylor is among 1,600 people whose voting status remained in doubt until Wednesday. The US Supreme Court said Virginia could move forward with its original plan to remove these voters from the rolls.

Last week federal judge And 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Virginia to restore voter registration. They ruled that Virginia illegally purged voters during the 90-day quiet period before elections, which is mandated by federal law to ensure last-minute mistakes don’t mistakenly disenfranchise voters like Taylor.

In Taylor’s case, she said she suspected the error occurred because when she first applied for a driver’s license in Virginia as a teenager, she was not yet a citizen. But she said she has been a citizen for several years.

She also acknowledged that she doesn’t regularly check her email and could easily have missed letters from the city elections board informing her of her suspension and opportunities to correct the situation.

Another Richmond voter, Eric Terrell, 66, said his voter registration was canceled in error. He said he learned of the problem because he called the elections office to inquire about the status of his absentee ballot request and after a couple of calls, he was told he had been removed from the rolls.

The Board of Elections informed Terrell that he could go to the polls on Tuesday and vote as part of Virginia’s same-day registration process. The vote will be provisional, but Virginia officials said 98% of provisional ballots are counted in the final count.

As a result, Terrell said he wasn’t particularly concerned about the confusion, which he believed was due to the wrong box about his citizenship being checked in the DMV transaction.

“As long as I can vote, it’s over for me,” he said in a telephone interview.

It is unclear how many of the 1,600 registrations in question involved citizens who should have been kept on the lists. Human rights groups and the media have repeatedly cited anecdotal evidence from citizens whose registrations were canceled in error.

An Associated Press review of only a small sample of the names on the list found both people who said they were wrongly excluded and people who confirmed they were noncitizens and should not have been registered.

In practice, anyone whose registration has been canceled has the opportunity to register the same day, either on Election Day or during early voting, which ends Saturday. Anyone who registers must prove that they are a citizen, but are not required to provide proof of citizenship.

Talia Simpson, a spokeswoman for the Prince William County Board of Elections, said eligible voters affected by the removal should take advantage of the same-day registration process, which she said voters of all stripes were doing in large numbers during early voting.

It’s unclear whether this issue will have any real effect in Virginia. The 1,600 registrations account for less than 0.03% of the state’s 6 million registered voters.

“We’re not sure it’s going to have much effect,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who is executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “It was a little concerning because there was strong evidence that there were at least some citizens on that list who were flagged. But on the other hand, Virginia also has same-day voter registration.”

Analysts say Vice President Kamala Harris leads Virginia by a comfortable margin over former President Donald Trump. While the state was considered a battleground state back in 2012, the commonwealth has begun to lean Democratic over the past decade. Polls show incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine with an even larger lead over his GOP opponent.

It’s also a state where the former president performed worse. Trump lost Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 And President Joe Biden in 2020.

However, Trump did not give up. He planned a campaign stop Saturday in Salem, Virginia, a day after campaigning in New Mexico, another state not considered a key battleground.

“We have a real chance,” Trump said as he called into a rally in the Richmond area on Saturday. “We’re about even in the polls.”

Susan Swecker, chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, said Trump’s visit to Salem will only strengthen Harris’ leadership.

“Kamala Harris will win Virginia convincingly, he knows, and any visit from this deranged lunatic will only increase the advantage,” she said.

In any case, not every voter wrongfully excluded from the rolls was enthusiastic about voting. One of those voters, Abdullah Al Mosawa of Alexandria, who became a citizen about five years ago, admitted he was unlikely to vote in this year’s presidential race.

“With the options we have now, if I tried it again, I would vote for a third party,” he said.

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Diaz reported from Arlington, Virginia. Associated Press writer Christine Fernando reported from Chicago.