The U.S. Supreme Court, in a partisan vote, did exactly what many feared it would do Wednesday in this pivotal election season and green-lighted a Republican-ordered, late-in-the-game scouring of Virginia voter rolls in search of “noncitizens.”

U.S. Supreme Court grants stay in challenge to Youngkin’s voter purge order

The court’s two-thirds majority of Republican-appointed justices (three by former President and current GOP nominee Donald Trump) granted a stay that Virginia’s Republican-led executive branch sought, after federal district and appellate courts temporarily voided Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s order 90 days before the election to purge Virginia voter rolls.

That means that the 1,600 people who failed to check the correct box on a Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles form and, in many cases, mistakenly identified themselves as noncitizens were excised from rolls of registered voters. Now, they bear the burden, if they’re lucky enough to find out about it in time, of re-registering at this late hour and casting provisional ballots subject to challenge after the polls close.

Youngkin has sought to position himself as a hero standing resolutely against hordes of swarthy outsiders corruptly seeking to influence American elections.

To be clear, Youngkin is legally and morally right in asserting noncitizens have no business voting in U.S. elections. Yet he’s never shown proof that it happens. 

According to the Washington Post, no noncitizen has tried to vote in Virginia since he became governor. What’s more, only three people were prosecuted since January 2022 for illegal voting of any kind in Virginia, the Post reported.

Former top state election officials say that maintaining clean, up-to-date voter rolls is work that goes on almost year-round as required under a 2006 state law — except in the three months before elections. Federal law specifically bars states from systematically purging its rolls during a “Quiet Period” 90 days ahead of a federal election.

All of which imparts an unmistakable partisan odor — rooted in Trump-inspired election denialism and nationwide Republican “election integrity” initiatives — to Youngkin’s Aug. 7 order to take extraordinary, expedited steps to find and excise noncitizens during that exact 90-day pre-election period.

Youngkin’s order is much more likely to disenfranchise actual citizens for paperwork snafus than to snare a foreigner hell-bent on voting. But then, this was always about political posturing, irrespective of bad operational outcomes or adverse consequences for legitimate citizen voters like lifelong Republican Christine Rabassa of Henrico County or Rina Shaw of Chesterfield County, both U.S.-born citizens and longtime registered voters.

Clean voter rolls are essential, but Youngkin’s late, politically driven ‘purge’ deserves challenge

Rabassa said in a sworn affidavit in support of litigation filed in U.S. District Court against Youngkin’s Executive Order 35 that she discovered her registration was “canceled” after she showed up for early in-person voting. She said a Henrico election supervisor “took her into a separate room” and told her she was removed for failing to check a box indicating her citizenship when she renewed her driver’s license in August and that she would have to re-register. She was turned away from the polls that day without being offered a provisional ballot and required to return another day to vote, the affidavit states.

Shaw also had no idea that a DMV clerical error compromised her right to vote.

“I actually wasn’t notified by Virginia. I was notified by NPR,” the unemployed computer programmer told the Mercury on Wednesday.

Had the public broadcaster not sought an interview with her for its Oct. 30 story on Youngkin’s order, Shaw said, she would have found out as Rabassa had — by being turned away at the polls. She said she called the Chesterfield registrar’s office and was told her removal was “a mistake,” though there was no explanation for it. She said she was assured that she was being reinstated and found when she checked her registration status online Wednesday that she had.

From this columnist, however, Shaw learned to her dismay that the Supreme Court’s Republican majority prevailed  6-3 in granting Virginia’s request for a stay, halting enforcement of lower court orders to reinstate voters in situations like hers and Rabassa’s.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, adding, “… and it was the same six votes that struck down Roe v. Wade, wasn’t it?” That decision in June 2022 ended 49 years of federal protection for abortion rights.

Yes, Rina. It was.

So, five days and a wakeup until the nation decides whether Trump or Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris will lead the free world for the next four years, Youngkin and Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares are joining other Republican-led states in imposing restrictions that make voting harder, especially for those with the fewest resources.

Alabama’s Republican secretary of state attempted a voter-removal program similar to Youngkin’s that was also struck down by a federal judge. It was unclear Wednesday whether the Supreme Court will rule similarly in Alabama’s case as it did in Virginia’s. 

In the 2020 and 2024 battleground state of Georgia, a state judge struck down a rule approved Sept. 20 by the pro-Trump conservative majority of that state’s electoral board that would have required the hand count of millions of paper ballots. It’s a state Trump narrowly lost in 2020 despite his desperate, corrupt attempt to sandbag Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, “to find 11,780 votes,” the margin by which he trailed Democrat Joe Biden.

There’s a bromide in politics about what motivates the two parties to vote, and there’s a lot of truth to it: “Democrats have to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.”

Youngkin recognizes that opposing Trump is lethal in today’s Trump-owned GOP where apostates are targeted for primaries and defeated. Just ask outgoing Rep. Bob Good or former Rep. Denver Riggleman, both Virginia Republicans who fell out of favor with Trump during their time in office.

In 2021, Youngkin was hailed nationally as the GOP’s post-Trump path forward when he won the governorship on his first bid for elective office with a genial, pragmatic, avuncular style that played well in Virginia and ended a 12-year GOP drought in statewide elections. Now, mindful of his party’s current landscape and his own lofty national ambitions, he has Super Glued his lips to Trump’s ample derriere.

He fell in line.