Just six days before Election Day, the Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to continue its purge of more than 1,600 individuals from the state’s voter rolls.
The vote was 6 to 3, along ideological lines, with liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
On Aug. 7, exactly 90 days before Election Day, Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order expediting the removal of noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls. The state maintained that the program only removed those who were ineligible to vote due to lack of citizenship.
In early October, the Justice Department and advocacy groups sued, contending that the state had in fact purged at least some eligible voters and that it did so in violation of a federal law that bars systematic removals from voting rolls in the 90 days prior to an election. Specifically, the 1993 National Voter Registration Act creates a “quiet period” within 90 days of a federal election. During those 90 days, states are prohibited from “systematic[ally]” removing “ineligible voters” from the rolls because of the increased possibility of errors.
The challengers alleged that Virginia’s voter purge did exactly what the federal law was aimed at preventing; it removed eligible voters who, as a result of the state’s action, did not know they were no longer eligible to vote.
A federal district court agreed, ordering Virginia to restore the approximately 1,600 voter registrations that were cancelled. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that order. Virginia then appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to allow the state to strike the voters purged in the 90 days prior to the election.
The state contended that the lower courts “misinterpreted the NVRA.” They argued that the “quiet period” cannot apply to noncitizens, since they are already ineligible to vote. Even if the “quiet period” did apply here, the state argued, the program was sufficiently individualized, not systematic.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court sided with Virginia, leaving the purged voters off the rolls and allowing the purge to continue.
In a statement, Youngkin called the order “a victory for commonsense and election fairness.”
The significance of court’s the ruling is more a matter of the signal it sends than how the court’s action will affect the election in Virginia, where polls show Vice President Harris well ahead of former President Trump. The signal it sends is that if a majority of the justices had an appetite for election appeals like this one, they almost certainly will have an appetite for election appeals from more contentious states in the coming days and weeks.
