Mere weeks before Election Day, Alabama and Virginia illegally removed thousands of voters from their rolls. These actions are designed to erode public confidence in elections, which already have safeguards in place to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote. Eligible voters are suffering the effects. Worse yet, in the case of Virginia, the Supreme Court is going along with it.
Federal law requires states to keep their voter rolls updated. However, it prohibits states from engaging in “systematic” list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election to ensure that eligible voters aren’t removed once it’s too late to re-register.
After Virginia removed more than 1,600 people from its rolls during this window in pursuit of noncitizens who are ostensibly on them, the Department of Justice and several private plaintiffs sued. On October 25, they won an emergency ruling in federal court ordering the state to reinstate everyone. The court of appeals refused to suspend the lower court’s decision, but on October 30 the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s order — meaning that Virginia will not have to reinstate the purged voters until the case has made its way through the full appeals process, which could take until after the election.
While the case turns on principles of statutory interpretation, the facts tell the real story: These actions, combined with the Supreme Court’s permission, will disenfranchise eligible Americans while catching very few or even zero noncitizens.
The plaintiffs easily identified dozens of citizens removed from the rolls, even without time to undertake a full analysis. And Virginia has yet to point a single noncitizen among the 1,600 removed. That comes as no surprise based on the experience of local registrars, who have found time and again that voters flagged as noncitizens are often eligible voters who missed a question or checked the wrong box at the Department of Motor Vehicles. In other cases, people who have naturalized may not have updated their citizenship status with the department. Virginia has seemingly not bothered to look for common errors such as these.
The case in Alabama was nearly identical: In August, Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) systematically removed more than 3,000 people who his office alleged were noncitizens. Even a cursory look showed how flawed the process was. Not one person on the list was definitively found to be a noncitizen. Hundreds responded to the cancellation notices by saying that they are citizens. A federal judge also blocked this program.
The reality is that studies and audits show voting by people without citizenship is extremely rare. The Brennan Center has found that in the 2016 election there were just 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast — or about one in a million. An audit of Georgia’s voter rolls last week revealed that just 20 noncitizens were registered out of more than 8.2 million people. These numbers make sense: it is already a crime under federal and state law for noncitizens to register or vote. The federal crime comes with prison time, deportation, and future denial of citizenship. Numerous safeguards ensure that only citizens vote, including the requirement that voters swear that they are citizens when registering and list maintenance programs that states must conduct before the 90-day quiet period.
States can and should remove individuals who they determine are not eligible to vote, including because of citizenship status. But during the 90-day period, removals must be specific, individual determinations. Alabama and Virginia are instead relying on mass database matching and form letters. Federal law prohibits this for the very reasons playing out in Virginia and Alabama.
The real purpose of these purges is to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections. People unhappy with the results can then point to the lies spread before the election as “proof” of wrongdoing.
Even when they lose in court, the conspiracists try to twist their defeats into talking points. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares claimed that the trial court’s ruling was proof of the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system. Nowhere did he or Gov. Glenn Youngkin acknowledge the many eligible voters they would disenfranchise or their decision to ignore federal law.
All available evidence suggests that only U.S. citizens are voting. As more claims to the contrary fall apart in court, the public should grow ever more confident in the integrity of our elections and the officials who run them.
