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The U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling on Wednesday allowing the state of Virginia to continue removing non-citizens from voting rolls.
The 6-3 decision reversed a lower federal court that ordered state officials to not only pause the removal but to also reinstate names that had been removed despite the fact that they are declared non-citizens.
It is against federal law for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.
The decision is a victory for Gov. Glenn Youngkin and comes just days after Virginia filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to halt a lower court ruling that ordered the restoration of approximately 1,600 individuals’ names to its voter rolls, Fox News reported.
At the center of the case is the question of whether Virginia’s voter removal process infringes on a so-called quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a federal law that mandates states to suspend all “systematic” voter roll maintenance for 90 days ahead of a federal election.
That argument placed the Department of Justice— which sued the state over its removal program earlier this month—against Youngkin, who maintained that the state’s process is “individualized” and complies with both state and federal law.
Justice Department officials also expressed concerns in their lawsuit that eligible voters may have been improperly removed from the rolls without sufficient notice or adequate time to rectify the error.
In Virginia’s petition to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Jason S. Miyares contested the lawsuit and subsequent court ruling on several grounds. He argued that the NVRA does not apply to “self-identified noncitizens” in the state, adopting a narrower interpretation of the law than the Justice Department, which he contended could undermine the primary basis for the lawsuit.
Secondly, he contended that if the NVRA does apply, the state still has an “individualized process” for removing voters, which is carried out by the Department of Motor Vehicles and local registration offices.
Late Monday, attorneys general from all 26 Republican-led states joined Virginia in filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, supporting its claim that the removal program was conducted on an “individualized” basis. They further argued that the Justice Department’s interpretation of the protections granted under the NVRA is overly broad and does not extend to noncitizens.
Attorneys urged the court to grant Virginia’s emergency motion and “restore the status quo,” noting that doing so “would comply with the law and enable Virginia to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming election.”
“This Court should reject Respondents’ effort to change the rules in the middle of the game and restore the status quo ante,” they wrote. “The Constitution leaves decisions about voter qualifications to the people of Virginia. And the people of Virginia have decided that noncitizens are not permitted to vote.”
U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, a Biden appointee, on Friday ordered the state to restore the registration of more than 1600 people whom it had taken off the rolls, per the SCOTUS Blog.
The blog noted further:
Giles barred the state from “continuing any systematic program intended to remove the names of ineligible voters from registration lists less than 90 days before the November 5, 2024, federal General Election,” although she left open the possibility that the state could still remove some voters on a case-by-case basis – for example, those with criminal convictions and those who have died. She also ordered the state to restore the registration of voters whom it had removed from the rolls as part of the program.
The state went to the 4th Circuit, asking it to put Giles’ order on hold. But a three-judge panel made up of two Obama appointees and one Biden appointee denied (as relevant here) that request on Sunday, writing that it was “unpersuaded” that Virginia’s program complied with the NVRA.
