Alarming Supreme Court Decision Green-lights Virginia Voter Purge

At least 1,600 people could be removed from the rolls, even though lower courts said the governor’s effort was not legal.

The Supreme Court has agreed to temporarily pause a lower court’s order that reinstated 1,600 voters to rolls in Virginia even though an appeals court found the purge of voters occurred in violation of a “quiet” period barring systematic changes to rolls so close to Election Day.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), an ally of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, had issued an executive order in August to use data from the Department of Motor Vehicles to remove people from the state’s voter rolls. Certain individuals were supposed be notified that their registrations would be canceled if they could not confirm their citizenship within 14 days.

Youngkin’s order triggered a wave of lawsuits, including from voting rights groups and the Department of Justice. They argued that the executive order ended up unfairly removing eligible voters due to bureaucratic errors that improperly labeled some people as noncitizens.

The plaintiffs — which included the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the League of Women Voters of Virginia, and the League of Women Voters of Virginia Education Fund, along with African Communities Together — also alleged that the purge was discriminatory, but no court has reached a decision on that claim.

The order issued Wednesday noted that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Kentanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan would have denied the request.