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    • Federal judge stops Virginia voter purge before Nov. 5
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    Federal judge stops Virginia voter purge before Nov. 5

    Umito Posted on

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    A federal judge in Virginia on Friday blocked the state from remove suspected non-citizens from electoral rolls and ordered the reinstatement of those removed from office due to the proximity of the November 5 elections.

    U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ruled executive order from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin signed on August 7 violated a federal law that prohibits the removal of names from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Voters who have been deregistered since that date must be notified and have their registration reinstated, Giles ruled.

    “This decision is a big victory,” said Ryan Snow, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represented advocacy groups in the lawsuit, which was combined with a similar action brought by the Ministry of Justice. stopped the outrageous mass purge of eligible voters in Virginia.

    Another federal court recently issued a similar ruling block voter suppression scheme in Alabama.

    Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, vowed to appeal Friday’s ruling.

    “It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” Miyares said in a statement. “Yet today, a court – urged by the Biden-Harris Justice Department – ​​ordered Virginia to re-register the names of non-citizens on the voter rolls, just days before a presidential election.”

    In a statement, Youngkin said the judge ordered the state to restore voter registration to 1,500 people who had identified themselves as noncitizens on motor vehicle records.

    Voting rights advocates have said citizenship filings could be decades old and voters could have become naturalized citizens since then. Aaron Baird, a spokesman for the advocacy group Project Democracy, whose lawyers represented the plaintiffs in the case, said safeguards were in place to prevent noncitizens from voting.

    “Voting-related crimes are extremely rare in Virginia and there is no evidence of prosecutions of non-citizens for voting in the past 20 years,” Baird said.

    GOP Fights to Block Non-Citizen Voters, But Studies Show No Widespread Problem

    The Republicans did fight against the vote of non-citizens an important question. But studies have shown that the problem is insignificant.

    Studies carried out by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Cato Libertarian Institute found that non-citizen voting is virtually non-existent. The Brennan Center studied 42 jurisdictions in 2016 and found 30 cases of alleged noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million ballots cast. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, announced Wednesday the state conducted an audit and found 20 noncitizens — whose voter registrations were canceled — out of 8.2 million registered voters.

    Virginia has had a law since 2006 – and enforced by Republican and Democratic administrations – that calls for the exclusion of any voter who declared themselves a non-citizen by filling out the state’s motor vehicle records and who is then accidentally or intentionally registered on the electoral roll.

    Youngkin reinforced this policy with his decree for the daily verification of files between voter registration lists and motor vehicle records. But the federal Voter Registration Act of 1993, nicknamed the “motor voter” law aimed at making registration easier, prohibits removing names from voter rolls closer to an election to avoid confusion or exclude people unfairly.

    What were the arguments in this case?

    Government lawyers argued that the federal court should not overturn the state’s longstanding policy for the same reason: The election is too close to reinstate registration of suspected noncitizens. The state said voters were only expelled if they voluntarily declared themselves non-citizens, were notified by mail that their registration was canceled and did not object to expulsion with an affirmation of their citizenship within 14 days.

    “Virginia’s process is individualized, non-discriminatory, accurate and lawful,” the state’s lawyers wrote in a court filing.

    But the Department of Justice has joined groups including the Coalition for Immigrant Rights, African Communities Together and the League of Women Voters to fight Youngkin’s executive order. The groups argued that motor vehicle records could be 20 years out of date, that naturalized citizens could be improperly deregistered, and that citizens with similar names and dates of birth to noncitizens could lose by mistake their registration.

    The advocacy groups cited Prince William County Registrar Eric Olsen who said at a Sept. 30 board of elections meeting that his office had reviewed 162 people listed as noncitizens in the county’s computer system. State and had discovered that 43 had already voted. But his office checked and found that all 43 had verified their citizenship, some as many as five times, but were still removed from the voting rolls.

    “The available evidence further indicates that Defendants’ system is uniquely flawed and riddled with errors,” the advocacy groups wrote in a court filing.

    Alabama federal judge strikes down program similar to Virginia’s

    Virginia’s ruling came after U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco struck down a similar program in Alabama.

    Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced on August 13 it identified 3,251 registered voters in the state who had been assigned non-citizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security and said they would be removed from the registration rolls. Allen acknowledged that some naturalized citizens could be deported.

    Several advocacy groups, including the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, the League of Women Voters of Alabama and the NAACP state conference, filed a lawsuit Sept. 13 to block Allen’s program. The Justice Department filed a similar complaint on September 27 and the cases were consolidated.

    “The court had ‘no difficulty’ in finding that irreparable harm was caused to eligible Alabamians targeted by this program,” said Danielle Lang, senior director for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, which helped report plead the case. “The court found that this was not a violation of the ‘no harm, no fault’ principle and will issue an injunction immediately.”

    Umito
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