Judge orders Virginia to restore 1,600 voter registrations canceled in effort to purge noncitizens

Matthew Barakat
| Associated press

Alexandria, Va. — A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations that she said were illegally deleted over the past two months in an effort to deter noncitizens from voting.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction filed by the Justice Department against Virginia election officials alleging that voter registrations were improperly canceled during a 90-day quiet period leading up to the November elections, which states from making wholesale changes to their elections. voter roles.

State officials said they will 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 in fact citizens whose registrations were canceled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes, such as a mischecked box on a form .

Justice Department attorney Sejal Jhaveri said Thursday at an injunction hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, that this is precisely why federal law prohibits states from making systematic changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before the elections, “to prevent the harm that comes with having eligible voters. voters removed at a time when it would be difficult to remedy.”

Giles said Friday that the state is not completely prohibited from removing noncitizens from the voting rolls during the 90-day silent period, but must do so on an individualized basis rather than through the automated, systematic program established by the state is used.

State officials unsuccessfully argued that the canceled registrations followed careful procedures that targeted people who explicitly identified themselves as non-citizens of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Charles Cooper, an attorney for the state, said during arguments Thursday that the federal law was never intended to protect noncitizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.

“Congress could not possibly have intended to prevent the removal… of persons who were never eligible to vote in the first place,” Cooper argued.

However, the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit said many people are wrongly identified as noncitizens by the DMV by simply checking the wrong box on a form. They could not identify exactly how many of the 1,600 purged voters are in fact citizens — Virginia only identified the names and addresses of affected individuals this week in response to a court order — but provided anecdotal evidence of individuals whose registrations were improperly canceled.

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as noncitizens could be citizens, but he said restoring them all to the rolls means that there will likely be “hundreds of noncitizens again.” be on that list. When a non-citizen votes.” , it cancels a legal vote and that is harmful,” he said.

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

State officials said any voter identified as a noncitizen was notified and given two weeks to challenge his disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form proving their citizenship, their registration was not canceled.

Prior to Youngkin’s executive order, the state checked voter rolls against DMV data monthly, in accordance with a state law passed in 2006.

Youngkin said the Justice Department unfairly targeted him for enforcing a law that was upheld by his predecessors, including Democrats, even if they had not taken the extra step of ordering daily checks, as he did in his executive order .

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: Just 11 days before the presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate more than 1,500 individuals — who identified themselves as noncitizens — on the voter rolls,” Youngkin said in a statement. statement afterwards. Friday hearing.

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

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

Her order requires that voter registration be reinstated for all voters canceled as a result of Youngkin’s executive order, and that letters be sent within five days notifying those voters of their reinstated status. The letters will also include a warning informing these individuals that if they are indeed noncitizens, they are barred from casting ballots under federal law.

The plaintiffs had asked the judge to grant those voters an extension of the deadline to request absentee ballots, but Giles denied that request, saying it would cause confusion.

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

Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a statement after Friday’s hearing criticizing the ruling.

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” he said. “Yet today — at the urging of the Biden-Harris Justice Department — a court ordered Virginia to put the names of noncitizens back on the voter rolls just days before the presidential election.”

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who briefed Justice Department officials on the removals. praised the ruling.

“Governor Youngkin’s purges have served one purpose: to disenfranchise thousands of lawfully voting citizens of the Commonwealth. That stops today,” he said.

Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.

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