The Supreme Court upholds Virginia’s efforts to target potential noncitizen voters

As is common in emergency situations, the Supreme Court’s brief order did not explain the majority’s reasoning. The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted their dissent, saying they would have denied Youngkin’s request to allow the voter purge.

Ryan Snow, an attorney for one of the groups challenging the purge, said the Supreme Court’s order ignores federal law that prohibits the removal of registered voters “on the eve of the election.”

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

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, it will be accurate and the will of the voters.”

Youngkin took issue with the suggestion that voters have been “cut off” from the voter rolls, noting that eligible voters in Virginia can still vote through the same-day registration process even if they are removed from the voter rolls. Such voters personally sign an acknowledgment of eligibility and then cast a provisional ballot, which is counted after election officials confirm their eligibility.

With Election Day less than a week away and the presidential contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris seen as essentially even, the Supreme Court is increasingly drawn into election-related disputes. Legal battles over voting rules are largely percolating in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada, and the justices are likely to be involved in additional lawsuits in the coming days.

This week, the justices already rejected a request from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejected removing his name from the presidential primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan after dropping his independent campaign and endorsing Trump.

In the Virginia case, the challengers sued state officials, saying they made changes too close to the election and — in their efforts to remove noncitizens — turned out eligible voters based on driver’s license application forms that could be wrong or outdated. Fully qualified voters who skipped or overlooked the citizenship question on those forms are caught up in the purge, as are 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 may do so,” Attorney General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, who represented the Biden administration, told the justices in court filings.

Across the country, Republicans in eight states have supported ballot measures to specify that only U.S. citizens can participate in elections, even though voting for noncitizens is already restricted in all state and federal elections. Non-residents 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 Youngkin, saying that a federal law known as the National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from purging their voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Giles halted the program until the day after the Nov. 5 election and ordered the state to send letters to all 1,600 people removed from the rolls, instructing registrars to reinstate those people and announcing that the removal process has been stopped .

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

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