Supreme Court allows Virginia to purge suspected noncitizens from voter registration rolls

A divided Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to implement a program that state officials say is aimed at removing suspected noncitizens from its voter registration rolls, siding with Republicans in one of its first significant decisions tied to next week’s election.

A divided Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to implement a program that state officials say is aimed at removing suspected noncitizens from its voter registration rolls, siding with Republicans in one of its first significant decisions tied to next week’s election. The decision, issued without comment from a majority of conservative justices, will allow the state to keep off the rolls certain voters it suspects of being noncitizens. Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, framed the effort in Virginia as a commonsense way of ensuring noncitizens don’t vote. But the Biden administration, voting rights groups and lower courts said Virginia’s program also ensnared – and potentially disenfranchised – an unknown number of citizens. Even though Virginia isn’t a battleground state, both the program and the legal fight took on sharply political overtones as Trump and other Republicans have fueled false narratives about widespread voting by noncitizens. At issue are about 1,600 voter registrations that Virginia said came from self-identified noncitizens but that a US District Court said hadn’t been fully vetted for citizenship status. Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections; none of the lower court rulings had changed that fact.