UPDATE (Oct. 25, 2024, 12:33 p.m. ET): On Friday, a federal judge ordered Virginia to stop systematically purging the state’s voter rolls and to restore the voter registration of more than 1,600 people who had been removed.
The Justice Department is suing Virginia election officials over their recent efforts to cancel voter registrations, alleging their actions violate a federal law that bars the purging of voter rolls so close to the election.
Filed on Friday, the lawsuit accuses the Virginia State Board of Elections and the Virginia commissioner of elections of violating the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period provision, which requires states to complete the removal of ineligible voters from the voter rolls no later than 90 days before federal elections. What’s more, the Justice Department alleges that some voters removed from lists are in fact U.S. citizens.
“The Commonwealth’s unlawful actions here have likely confused, deterred, and removed U.S. citizens who are fully eligible to vote —the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision,” the Justice Department says in its suit.
Virginia election officials began enacting a program to make daily updates to the state’s voter list after Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in August. The governor, who has parroted Donald Trump’s unfounded claims about noncitizen voting, has framed the program as an effort to reinforce election security, even though voting rights organizations say such efforts disproportionately affect naturalized citizens.
The DOJ is seeking an injunction to restore eligible voters to the voter rolls and prevent future violations to the quiet period provision. “By cancelling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement. Youngkin called the lawsuit “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections” in Virginia. It is rare and already illegal for noncitizens to vote in U.S. elections. Yet claims of widespread “noncitizen voting” have caught on among Republicans, as Trump and his allies prime their supporters to deny a potential loss in November. A handful of GOP-led states have similarly removed people from their voter rolls in what they have characterized as a crackdown on noncitizen voting. Alabama also faces a lawsuit from the Justice Department for removing more than 3,200 people from voter rolls during the 90-day period ahead of the election. In his August statement announcing the removal of registered voters who at one time had been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen acknowledged that some of the people his office removed from voter rolls may now be naturalized citizens and eligible to vote.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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