Judge orders Va. restoring 1,600 deleted voter registrations

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.

State officials said they would appeal. The ruling also sparked criticism from former President Donald Trump, who wrote on social media that the ruling “is a completely unacceptable travesty.”

“Only US citizens should be able to vote,” Trump wrote.

In issuing her ruling on Friday, Giles bristled at the suggestion that she was restoring voting rights to foreigners. She said the state had no proof that the removed voters were not citizens of the country, but canceled their registrations anyway in violation of federal law.

“I don’t deal in beliefs,” she told a Virginia lawyer when he again described those removed from the list as foreigners. “I’m dealing with evidence.”

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 noncitizens from its voter rolls during the 90-day silence period, but it must do so on a case-by-case basis, not 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 “hundreds of foreigners will most likely be returned to the rolls.” Voting by a foreigner invalidates the legal vote. And that’s a disservice,” 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 the 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.