The Supreme Court’s conservative justices allow Virginia to resume its voter registration purge

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday allowed Virginia to resume its purging voter registrations which the state says it is aiming for stop people who are not US citizens from voting.

The Supreme Court, over dissents by the three liberal justices, granted an emergency appeal by Virginia’s Republican administration led by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The court gave no reasons for its action, which is typical in urgent appeals.

The justices acted on Virginia’s appeal after a federal judge found the state illegally purged more than 1,600 voter registrations in the past two months. A federal appeals court had previously allowed the judge’s order to remain in effect.

Such voting is rare in American electionsbut the specter of immigrants voting illegally has been a major part of political messages this year from former President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

Trump had criticized the earlier ruling, calling it “a completely unacceptable travesty” on social media. “Only American citizens should be allowed to vote,” Trump wrote.

The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued the state earlier in October, alleging that Virginia election officials who acted on an executive order issued in August by Youngkin were striking names from voter rolls in violation of federal election law.

National Voter Registration Act requires one 90 day “quiet period” prior to the election for the maintenance of the voter lists, so that legitimate voters are not removed from the lists by bureaucratic errors or last-minute mistakes that cannot be quickly corrected.

Youngkin issued his order on August 7, the 90th day before the November 5 election. It required daily checks of data from the state Department of Motor Vehicles against voter rolls to identify non-U.S. citizens.

Protect Democracy, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit, cited media interviews with voters showing that the Youngkin administration’s purge has removed American citizens from the voter rolls.

One example is Nadra Wilson, who lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and said NPR she was swept up in the purge. “I was born in Brooklyn, NY, I’m a citizen,” Wilson said before displaying her US passport as proof of her citizenship.

Project Democracy said in a statement that “this program is disenfranchising eligible voters. Virginia has not produced evidence that non-citizens have participated in elections. Because there is none. And it is actually eligible VA voters who have been caught in the middle in this election subversion scheme.”

People can still register to vote in Virginia’s earliest voting period or on Election Day and cast provisional ballots, voting advocates said.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles said election officials could still remove names on an individual basis, but not through a systematic purge.

Giles had ordered the state to notify affected voters and local registrars by Wednesday that the records have been restored.

Youngkin said the Supreme Court’s action was “a victory for common sense and electoral justice.”

“Clean voter rolls are an important part of a comprehensive approach we take to ensure the fairness of our elections,” he said in a written statement.

Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.

In a similar lawsuit in Alabama, a federal judge this month ordered the state to restore eligibility to more than 3,200 voters who had been deemed ineligible non-citizens. 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.

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Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat in Alexandria, Virginia, Denise Lavoie in Richmond and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.