Judge orders Virginia to restore 1,600 voter registrations canceled in order to purge non-citizens

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations it says were illegally deleted over the past two months to prevent noncitizens from voting.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted a motion for an injunction brought against Virginia election officials by the Justice Department alleging that voter registrations were wrongly canceled during the 90-day quiet period before the November election, preventing states from making changes to elections large-scale voter rolls.

Thomas Sanford, a lawyer in the Virginia attorney general’s office, told the judge at the end of Friday’s hearing that the state intends to appeal her ruling.

The Justice Department and private groups, including the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were canceled were actually citizens whose registrations were canceled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes such as a wrongly checked box on a form.

Justice Department lawyer Sejal Jhaveri said during a daylong injunction hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, that’s why federal law prevents states from making systematic changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before an election “to prevent harm to having eligible voters.” . voters removed at a time when it is difficult to remedy it.”

Giles said Friday that the state is not completely prohibited from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls during the 90-day election silence period, but it must do so on an individualized basis rather than based on an automated, systematic program used by the state.

State officials argued unsuccessfully that the canceled registrations followed detailed procedures and involved people who clearly identified themselves to the Department of Motor Vehicles as noncitizens.

Charles Cooper, a state attorney, said during Thursday’s debates that federal law was never intended to provide protections for noncitizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.

“Congress could never have intended to prevent the removal of… persons who were never eligible to vote in the first place,” Cooper argued.

The plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, however, said the DMV incorrectly identifies many people as foreigners simply by checking the wrong box on a form. They weren’t able to determine exactly how many of the 1,600 voters removed were actually citizens – Virginia only released the names and addresses of those affected in response to the court’s ruling this week – but they did provide anecdotal evidence about people whose registrations were wrongly canceled .

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as foreigners may well be citizens, but said that restoring them all to the rolls means that there will most likely be “hundreds of foreigners on those rolls again.” If a foreigner votes, it invalidates the legal vote, and that is a pity,” he said.

He also said with less than two weeks until the election, it’s too late to put the burden of restoring registration on busy election board workers, and said the plaintiffs, who filed lawsuits about two weeks ago, should have acted sooner.

Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, issued an executive order in August requiring daily DMV checks of voter rolls to identify noncitizens.

State officials said any voter identified as a non-citizen was notified and given two weeks to contest his or her disqualification before being removed. If they return the form confirming their citizenship, their registration will not be canceled.

In media interviews, Youngkin questioned the Justice Department’s motives for filing the lawsuit.

“How can I, as governor, allow foreigners to be on the voter roll?” Youngkin asked rhetorically during a Sunday appearance on Fox News.

Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, released a statement after Friday’s hearing criticizing the ruling.

“Removing an illegal voter should never be illegal,” he said. “Yet today, the Court – under pressure from the Biden-Harris Department of Justice – ordered Virginia to put the names of noncitizens back on the voter rolls, just days before the presidential election. The Justice Department pulled off this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging the Virginia lawsuit signed 18 years ago by a Democratic governor and approved by the Justice Department in 2006.

Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.

A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama, and last week a federal judge there ordered the state to restore the eligibility of more than 3,200 voters who were deemed ineligible foreigners. Testimony by state officials in the case showed that approximately 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were considered inactive were actually legally registered citizens.