Virginia asks the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the expungement of 1,600 voter registrations

WASHINGTON — Virginia asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to intervene so the state can remove about 1,600 voters from its voter rolls that it believes are not citizens.

The request comes after a federal appeals court unanimously affirmed a ruling federal judge’s order restoring the registrations of those 1,600 voters, who the judge said were illegally removed from the voter rolls under an executive order from the state’s Republican governor.

Governor Glenn Youngkin says he ordered the daily removals in an effort to deter non-citizens from voting.

But on Friday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles said Youngkin’s program was illegal under federal law because it systematically purged voters during a 90-day “quiet period” before the November election.

The Department of Justice and a coalition of private groups sued to block Youngkin’s removal program earlier this month. They argued that the silent period is to ensure that legitimate voters are not removed from the list due to bureaucratic errors or last-minute errors that cannot be resolved in a timely manner.

Youngkin said he was simply enforcing a state law that requires Virginia to cancel the registration of non-citizens.

On Sunday, a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, sided with the judge who ordered the restoration of voter registrations.

The appeals court ruled that Virginia is wrong to claim it is being forced to put 1,600 non-citizens back on the voter rolls. Instead, the appeals court ruled that Virginia’s process for removing voters did not provide evidence that the purged voters were in fact noncitizens.

Youngkin’s executive order, issued in August, required daily checks of Department of Motor Vehicles 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.

Prosecutors said that, as a result of the program, a legitimate voter and citizen could have his or her registration revoked by simply checking the wrong box on a DMV form. The plaintiffs presented evidence showing that at least some of those removed were in fact citizens.

A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama, and a federal judge was heard there last week the state ordered to restore eligibility to more than 3,200 voters who were 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.

The opinion was written by Toby Heytens, a Biden appointee, and joined by Chief Justice Albert Diaz and Justice Stephanie Thacker, both Obama appointees.

The panel, like Giles in its initial ruling, emphasized that the state has the right to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls even during the 90-day silence period, but that it must do so in an individualized process and not in a systematic process that relies on data transfers from the DMV.

Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.