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With a divided Supreme Court opinion Wednesday, Virginia will side with Republicans in one of the high court’s first major rulings related to next week’s elections, removing suspected noncitizens from its voter registration rolls. allowed the continuation of a program that state officials say is designed to
The decision, handed down without basis by a majority of conservative justices, allows states to exclude certain voters suspected of being non-citizens from their rolls.
The court’s three liberals, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. Liberals did not explain their reasoning.
Although the incident involved a relatively small number of voters in a state not considered a battleground state in the race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the incident It affected a wide range of political discourse driven by members of the Republican Party and led to widespread voting debates by the Republican Party. Non-citizen.
In response to the decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said, “The Biden-Harris administration’s legal intervention was irresponsible, reckless, and politically motivated.” “States have a constitutional duty to prevent non-citizens from voting. The Supreme Court did the right thing.”
But voting rights groups pointed to evidence that Virginia’s voter purge efforts have caught up with people who are eligible to vote. These groups condemned the Supreme Court’s unsigned order as “outrageous” and “alarming.”
“Every voter has the right to vote and have their vote counted, and this ruling does nothing to change that,” Harris campaign spokesman Charles Rutbach said in a statement. “Voting by noncitizens remains illegal under federal law.”
Meanwhile, legal experts were unable to analyze the meaning of the court’s ruling due to a lack of explanation. This is not uncommon in the courts’ “shadow dockets,” which typically handle emergency cases, but courts sometimes leave clues about their rationale in high-profile cases.
In this case, the majority said nothing.
Protect Democracy’s general counsel Orion Danjuma said: “This is one of the clearest examples of a shadow document being misused,” adding that the group “has no reason to understand” the High Court’s call. I lamented.
Both the plan and the legal battle took on sharp political overtones, as Mr. Trump and other Republicans promoted false theories about widespread voting by noncitizens. At issue are about 1,600 voter registrations that Virginia says are from self-proclaimed non-citizens, but a federal district court has said they were not adequately vetted for citizenship status.
Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections. No lower court ruling changed that fact.
Trump and other Republicans have pressed claims of illegal voting, which were part of the arguments they made to explain the former president’s 2020 loss. However, documented cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare. A recent audit of Georgia’s 8.2 million people on its rolls found that only 20 noncitizens were registered, and only nine of them voted.
The Virginia case began with an order signed by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) in August. The order required election authorities to take more aggressive measures to check the voter rolls and purge residents who call themselves non-citizens. Those matches.
Yonkin on Wednesday called the Supreme Court’s order “a victory for common sense and election fairness.”
He said voters in the state “can vote on Election Day knowing that Virginia’s elections are fair, secure and free from politically motivated interference.”
Voters and immigrant rights groups labeled the Supreme Court’s decision “outrageous” and predicted it would cause chaos.
“It is outrageous that the Supreme Court allowed Virginia to carry out a last-minute purge of so many known eligible citizens in the final days before the election,” said Daniel Lang of the Campaign Legal Center. . “But voters, not courts, will decide this election. Eligible Virginia voters should know that they can still register and vote on Election Day, regardless of this purge.”
A Justice Department spokesperson said the Biden administration does not agree with the order.
“The department brought this lawsuit to ensure that all eligible Americans can vote in elections,” the spokesperson said.
The Biden administration and voting rights groups filed a lawsuit, and a U.S. district court concluded last week that at least some eligible U.S. citizens had been disenrolled under the program. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said none of the parties knew exactly the citizenship status of the purged voters because the information had not been verified.
Opponents of the plan relied on the National Voter Registration Act, a 1993 law that prohibits states from “systematically” changing their voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election. The Biden administration said Yonkin’s order created just that kind of systematic program within the so-called “quiet period” required by federal law.
Virginia argued that the silent period ban applied only to voters, not noncitizens.
None of the lower court orders prevent states from conducting eligibility assessments of individuals or ultimately removing noncitizen voters from their rolls, giving noncitizens the right to vote in federal elections. But it wasn’t. Federal law prohibits only “systemic” changes.
A three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (all appointed by Democratic presidents) upheld most of Giles’ ruling, leaving the program suspended and the 1,600 enrollment requested the state to put the person back on the list.
In an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, Virginia election officials relied in part on a developing legal theory that warns federal courts against making last-minute changes to voting rules before an election. The so-called “Purcell doctrine” is intended to prevent federal courts from becoming embroiled in last-minute election disputes.
Virginia argued that the federal district court violated that principle by suspending the program. Voting rights groups countered that the case specifically applied a federal law that allows plaintiffs to challenge last-minute vote changes.
Virginia attorneys also pointed to the option of same-day registration. Those whose registrations were mistakenly canceled were able to re-register at in-person voting locations by verifying their citizenship.
Opponents in Virginia said that option would not solve the problem for purged voters who had planned to vote absentee without knowing their registration had been canceled, and that poll workers in particular would not be able to handle this scenario. They argued that there was a risk of confusion at voting stations if sufficient preparations were not made to do so.
The Supreme Court has not provided any explanation for its decision, so it remains to be seen whether any of Virginia’s arguments were persuasive or whether a majority of justices decided that the election was too close for federal courts to intervene in election disputes. It is not clear whether he did so.
The problem with assuming the court decided the case based on parcels and timing is that the National Voter Registration Act’s “quiet period” is He said this necessarily entails challenges faced just before the election. school.
The Supreme Court’s silence was particularly perplexing, he said, given that lower courts have consistently deemed the case a loss for Virginia.
“It’s hard to tell because there’s nothing there,” said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia University School of Law and an expert on election law. “That’s pretty impressive.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
