Supreme Court allows Virginia remove non-citizens suspected from voter rolls
EMERGENCY DOCKET
on October 30, 2024
at 11:00 am
Virginia can resume its program of removing suspected noncitizens before Tuesday’s elections. (Katie Barlow).
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked an order from a federal court that would have forced Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voters to the voter register. U.S. District judge Patricia Tolliver Giles determined that the state had cancelled the registration of over 1,600 voters since early August, at least some of which were U.S. Citizens eligible to vote. This was done as part of a program to remove suspected noncitizens. In a brief, unsigned order issued on Wednesday morning the justices granted Virginia’s request to place Giles’ order in limbo while a legal challenge continues. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would not have granted the state’s request. Glenn Youngkin. Youngkin directed the state’s department of motor vehicles to provide state election officials with data on a daily basis to allow them to identify and cancel the voter registration of suspected noncitizens unless they could verify their citizenship within 14 days.
The Biden administration and the private challengers contend that Youngkin’s order violates a provision of the National Voter Registration Act known as the “quiet period” provision, which generally prohibits states from “systematically” removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election.
Giles barred the state from continuing the program, although she left open the prospect that the state could still remove voters on an individual basis – for example, if they had died or are not eligible to vote because of a criminal conviction.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit left Giles’ order in place, the state came to the Supreme Court. Virginia argued that the NVRA’s “quiet period” provision did not apply to Youngkin’s order, because the law doesn’t bar the removal of noncitizens if they are not eligible to vote. The state argued that Giles’ order violated the Purcell principle, which states that courts shouldn’t change election rules in the weeks before an election.
But U.S. The Solicitor-General Elizabeth Prelogar countered by saying that the “quiet” period provision only applies to the months leading up to an election. Therefore, the law “expressly anticipates” that challenges would be filed during the month prior to an election. “Indeed,” she wrote, “it appears that no court has invoked Purcell to deny relief when faced with a violation of the Quiet Period Provision.”
Virginia’s voter-purge program is also precisely the kind of “systematic” program that the “quiet period” provision bars, Prelogar insisted. Virginia’s DMV created lists of suspected citizens, which were then electronically compared to information in other agencies databases, without real opportunity for a case-by-case review. In fact, Prelogar noted, “one local registrar indicated that he was compelled to cancel registrations even when his files contained ‘ample evidence of their citizenship.'”
Prelogar pushed back against the state’s suggestion that, if Giles’ order were allowed to remain in place, it would be permanently harmed by its inability to enforce its own laws. “
hat principal,” she argued, “carries little sway here, when a State’s choice of how to implement its laws is a “clear violation” of a federal law enacted to avoid the type of disenfranchisement that applicants have caused in this case.”
But on Wednesday morning in a one paragraph order, the court granted the request of the state to put Giles order on hold until the challenge to voter-purge continues in the lower courts. As is often the case with emergency appeals, the justices did not provide any reasoning for their decision.
Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson indicated that they would have denied the state’s request, but they also did not explain why they would have done so.[T]This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
