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.

The Virginia law allowing election officials to remove people from voter rolls if they are listed as noncitizens has led to controversy during this election cycle, but it was once a politically neutral issue.

John Aughenbaugh, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the law was championed by Ken Cuccinelli, who was then a Republican state senator and later became attorney general.

It was signed into law in 2006 by Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine.

“It was basically a bipartisan measure,” Aughenbaugh said.

Even though the law has been on the books for nearly 20 years, this is the first time it has become so contentious.

“In part, the reason why it became an issue is that the Biden administration became very skeptical of states purging their voter rolls in the aftermath of what Georgia did after the 2020 presidential election,” Aughenbaugh said.

A sweeping rewrite of Georgia’s election rules was signed into law in 2021 by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, making numerous changes to how elections are administered, including adding a new photo ID requirement for voting absentee by mail.

Republican supporters said the law was needed to restore confidence in Georgia’s elections. But Democrats said it would restrict voting access, especially for voters of color.

“President Biden gave an infamous speech where he said that his Justice Department would not allow states like Georgia to reinstitute Jim Crow laws,” Aughenbaugh said. “This has been a point of emphasis for the Biden administration.”

The Justice Department filed a suit against Virginia earlier this month, arguing that making large-scale changes to voter rolls within 90 days of an election was against federal regulations.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his administration took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sided with Youngkin on Wednesday.

Aughenbaugh said Youngkin’s administration “didn’t do anything unusual” in implementing the law.

What was unusual, according to Aughenbaugh, was Youngkin publicly drawing attention to the law and issuing an executive order “codifying” it exactly 90 days before this year’s election.

“If it wasn’t issued as an executive order and it didn’t get publicized, then perhaps it wouldn’t have caught the attention of the Biden administration,” Aughenbaugh said.

Aughenbaugh said state lawmakers could potentially make changes to the law, like having it paused within 90 days of an election, in order to prevent such a controversy in the future.

“I think the General Assembly should give some consideration to revising the law to avoid this kind of conflict,” Aughenbaugh said. “This is completely unnecessary.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the state of Virginia is allowed to resume its purge of non-citizen voter registrations. The state has said its goal is to ensure that people who aren’t U.S. citizens don’t vote illegally. 

Virginia’s attorney general had asked the Supreme Court to intervene – just days ahead of the general election – to allow the state to move forward with its removal of roughly 1,600 alleged non-citizens from its voter rolls.

The request came after a federal appeals court upheld a federal judge’s order Sunday to restore the registrations of those questionable voters.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in August requiring daily checks of DMV data against voter rolls to identify non-citizens. 

But the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of private groups sued Youngkin claiming the removal violated a provision of the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to complete programs of removing ineligible voters from registration lists up to 90 days before federal elections.

The Justice Department also claimed that the canceled registrations were, in fact, citizens and they were removed because of bureaucratic errors or mistakes like a mischecked box on a form.

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But state officials argue the canceled registrations followed careful procedures that revealed people who explicitly identified themselves as non-citizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles. They point out that federal law does not provide voting rights to non-citizens who by definition can’t vote in federal elections. 

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted an injunction Friday saying Youngkin’s program was illegal and ordered the restoration of the voters’ registrations. 

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares said in response to the ruling. “Yet, today a Court – urged by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice – ordered Virginia to put the names of non-citizens back on the voter rolls, mere days before a presidential election. The Department of Justice pulled this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging a Virginia process signed into law 18 years ago by a Democrat governor and approved by the Department of Justice in 2006.”

A three-judge panel of a federal appeals court struck down Virginia’s challenge to Judge Giles’ ruling stopping the practice Sunday.

Now the Supreme Court has granted Virginia officials’ request for emergency relief after they argued the 90-day provision does not apply to the removal of non-citizens from the voter rolls. 

Miyares’ had also argued that requiring Virginia to restore the voter registrations of non-citizens is a “violation of Virginia law and common sense.”

Last week, a federal judge also ordered Alabama to restore eligibility to the more than 3,200 voters who were deemed ineligible non-citizens.

As CBN News reported, although non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, there is evidence that state officials’ concerns over election integrity are not entirely unfounded. 

In a 2016 post-election audit report, the state of North Carolina discovered 41 instances where immigrants who were not yet U.S. citizens voted in state elections. 

Eloy Alberto Zayas-Berrier, an immigrant from Cuba, told the Washington Times he can’t qualify for U.S. citizenship and Cuba has refused to take him back.

But even without a green card, he showed up to early voting in North Carolina on Nov. 5, 2016, was invited to register, and cast a ballot. 

Juan Francisco Landeros-Mireles joined a line of people at a food pantry and ended up registering to vote. His lawyer, James Todd Jr., said Landeros-Mireles cast a ballot in the 2012 and 2016 elections. 

“The fact of the matter is, when you go to vote in person, you are asked your name and your residence and then you’re asked to sign on the list there. There’s no questions about citizenship at that point,” Todd explained. 

Earlier this year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to bolster efforts to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections by requiring proof of citizenship to register.

“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said. 

Johnson’s legislation would have required voters to provide a form of I.D. including a U.S. passport, military I.D., birth certificate, naturalization certificate, or a government-issued photo I.D. card showing that the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States.

And if someone was voting by mail, they must go to an election official’s office to show proof of citizenship by a certain deadline.

“Proof of citizenship as a requirement to vote in our elections should not be controversial – it is our responsibility to protect the integrity of our electoral process,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) said.