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

Mateusz Barak
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Alexandria, Virginia — A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations it said 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.

State officials said they would appeal.

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.

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.

Before Youngkin’s order, the state checked voter rolls monthly for DMV records, as required by a state law passed in 2006.

Youngkin said the Justice Department wrongly accused him of following a law that his predecessors, including Democrats, followed, even if they didn’t take the extra step of ordering daily inspections, as he did in his order.

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: Just eleven days before the presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 people on the voter rolls who identified themselves as foreign nationals,” Youngkin said in a statement after the event. Friday’s hearing.

For her part, Giles questioned the timing of Youngkin’s order, which was issued on Aug. 7, at the very beginning of the 90-day calm period required under federal law.

“It is no coincidence that this was announced precisely on the 90th day” of the quiet period, she said from the bench on Friday.

Her order requires the voter registration of all people canceled as a result of Youngkin’s order to be restored and letters to inform those voters of their restored status be sent within five days. The mailers will also include a warning informing these people that if they are indeed foreign nationals, they are barred from voting under federal law.

The plaintiffs asked a judge to extend the deadline for requesting absentee ballots, but Giles denied the request, saying it would cause confusion.

“We may not be able to achieve everything we want,” she said.

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.”

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who notified Justice Department officials about the deportations. praised the ruling.

“Governor Youngkin’s purges served only one purpose – to disenfranchise thousands of legally voting Commonwealth citizens. That’s where it ends today,” he said.

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.