OAN Staff James Meyers
8:34 AM – Wednesday, October 30, 2024
The Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to temporarily halt a Virginia court ruling after a federal judge ordered the state to reinstate hundreds of noncitizens to the state’s voter rolls.
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The big decision in favor of Governor Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.) comes just days after the Old Dominion state filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to halt a lower court decision ordering it to restore the names of almost 1,6000 individuals to its voter rolls.
The issue with the case was whether Virginia’s voter removal process violates a so-called quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), or a federal law requiring states to halt all “systematic” voter roll maintenance for a 90-day period before a federal election.
The argument caused the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to sue the state over its removal program earlier this month against Youngkin, who has insisted the state’s process is “individualized” and conducted in accordance with state and federal law.
Meanwhile, the state’s voter poll maintenance program was implemented in August and compares the state Department of Motor Vehicles’ list of self-identified noncitizens to its list of registered voters. As a result, individuals without citizenship were flagged and informed that their voter registration would be canceled unless they could prove their citizenship in 14 days.
However, the DOJ argued that the removals were conducted too close to the November 5th elections and claimed it violated the NVRA’s quiet period provision, a decision backed by a U.S. judge in Alexandria, who ordered Virginia last week to halt is removals and to reinstate the registrations of all 1,600 removed individuals.
Additionally, Justice Department officials also noted concerns in their lawsuit that eligible votes may have been incorrectly removed from the rolls without adequate notice or with enough time to correct the mistake.
Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares objected to the lawsuit on behalf of the state. He argued that the NVRA does not extend to “self-identified noncitizens” in the state. He also argued that if the NVRA does apply, the state still has an “individualized process” of removing voters that is conducted by the Department of Motor Vehicles and directly by local registration offices.
Furthermore, on Monday attorney generals from all 26 Republican-led states joined Virginia in filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, backing its assertion that the removal program was conducted on an “individualized” basis, and further, that the Justice Department’s reading of the protections granted under NVRA are overly broad and do not apply 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.”
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