Judge orders Virginia to restore 1,600 voter registrations voided in effort to remove citizens

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter records it said were illegally removed over the past two months in an effort to prevent citizens from voting.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted a request for an injunction brought against Virginia election officials by the Department of Justice, which alleged that voter registrations were improperly voided during a 90-day quiet period before by the November election, which restricts states from making large-scale changes to them. voter lists.

Thomas Sanford, a lawyer with the Virginia attorney general’s office, told the judge at the end of Friday’s hearing that the state plans to appeal her decision.

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 be a wrongly ticked box on a form.

Justice Department attorney Sejal Jhaveri said during an all-day hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Va., that that’s precisely why federal law prevents states from implementing systematic changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. , “to prevent the harm of having eligible. remote voters at a time when it is hard to fix.”

Giles said Friday that the state is not completely barred from removing citizens from voting rolls during the 90-day quiet period, but that it must do so on an individual basis rather than through the automated, systematic, staffed program state.

State officials unsuccessfully argued that the revoked registrations followed careful procedures targeting people who explicitly identified themselves as noncitizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Charles Cooper, an attorney for the state, said during Thursday’s hearing that the federal law was never intended to protect non-citizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.

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

The plaintiffs who brought the suit, however, said many people are wrongly identified as noncitizens by the DMV simply by checking the wrong box on a form. They were unable to identify exactly how many of the 1,600 purged voters are actually citizens—Virginia only this week identified the names and addresses of affected people in response to a court order—but provided anecdotal evidence of people whose records were wrongly cancelled.

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as non-citizens may be citizens, but said restoring them to the rolls means, in all likelihood, “hundreds of non-citizens will be back on those rolls. If a non-citizen votes. , nullifies a legal vote, and that’s bad,” he said.

He also said that with the election less than two weeks away, it was too late to impose the burden of restoring records on busy election workers, and said plaintiffs who filed their lawsuits about two weeks ago should have to take action sooner.

Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order in August requiring daily checks of DMV data against voter rolls to identify non-citizens.

State officials said any voter identified as a non-citizen was notified and given two weeks to appeal their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form proving their citizenship, their registration would not be cancelled.

In media interviews, Youngkin questioned the Justice Department’s motives for filing the lawsuit.

“How can I, as governor, allow non-citizens to be on the voter rolls?” Youngkin asked rhetorically during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.

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

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” he said. “Yet today, a court — urged by the Biden-Harris Justice Department — ordered Virginia to put the names of non-citizens back on the voter rolls, just days before the presidential election. The Justice Department pulled this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging a Virginia lawsuit signed into law 18 years ago by a Democratic governor and approved by the Justice Department in 2006.”

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 eligibility to more than 3,200 voters who were deemed ineligible. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that about 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were inactive were actually legally registered citizens.