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 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.

Virginia officials have asked the United States Supreme Court to block a lower court’s ruling that roughly 1,600 people purged from voter rolls by Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order must be reinstated. Two lawsuits allege that Youngkin’s order violated federal law  by removing voters from rolls too close to Election Day, a claim the governor refutes by pointing to a 2006 state law as the basis of his action.

Virginia asks Supreme Court to block order to reinstate 1600 people stripped from voter rolls

The situation has raised questions on whether state lawmakers should consider amending that law for additional clarity and to avoid future legal disputes over how Virginia confirms voter registration shortly before elections. 

Youngkin has said repeatedly that his executive order was built on a 2006 state law for voter roll cleanups, which directs the Department of Motor Vehicles to send data to the State Board of Elections of people who failed to indicate U.S. citizenship in paperwork. There’s a process of notification and then purging of voters who fail to prove their citizenship, and in previous years, the process was done on a monthly basis. Youngkin’s order directed DMV and Elections Department officials to perform it daily.  

The lawsuits the state and Youngkin face say Youngkin’s order ran afoul of the National Voter Registration Act, which institutes a “quiet period” on such actions 90 days before an election. Several state lawmakers have signaled they agree with that allegation, including House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, who previously told The Mercury “The reason that we have this 90-day rule is that we don’t want citizens to be accidentally removed.”

Privileges and Elections Committee chair Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, called Youngkin’s order “reckless” and alleged that it’s being used to “fire up the (Republican) base.”

“When you actually look at the issue of the matter, it’s the 90-day quiet period,” Rouse said. 

The courts will decide the matter concerning the legal challenges, John Aughenbaugh, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said. 

But he added that the Youngkin administration “brought this on themselves” by issuing the order so close to the 90-day federal threshold.  

However, Aughenbaugh said, “I can understand why the Youngkin admin told Fox News ‘we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong,’” in citing the 2006 law. 

That measure was carried by former republican state Sen. Ken Cucinelli and signed by former Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine. At that time, Republican President George Bush’s Department of Justice had issued a memo that it didn’t object to the law. 

In the time since, no one has challenged it, until the two suits against Youngkin. 

An argument in Attorney General Jason Miyares’ Supreme Court filing notes confusion on when the federal 90-day law should overpower the 2006 state law. 

“The current confusion surrounding the NVRA makes the rules anything but clear,” Miyares’ petition reads. “States are unaware of when, or whether, they can remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. They need to know with certainty whether they can remove noncitizens at any point, only outside of the Quiet Period, or never.”

On Tuesday, the Republican National Committee and Republican Party of Virginia also filed a brief in support of the state’s SCOTUS request.

Virginia GOP calls on U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate Youngkin’s voter purge order

Rouse said there hasn’t yet been talk between himself and other members of the Privileges and Elections Committee about tweaking the 2006 law to spell out the 90-day threshold of the NVRA.

“We haven’t had those conversations,” he said. 

As to resolving any confusion, Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, said that the state legislature broadly is always looking at ways past laws might need to be amended. 

“This might be one of those times,” he said. “The question then becomes ‘is there a bipartisan solution?” 

It might also come down to the question of how to prevent governors from overstepping or skirting federal law, as well as how to prevent presidential administrations from wading into state law, Aughenbaugh suspects. 

The debacle playing out on the national stage might prompt Virginia legislators to ask, “Did the Youngkin administration too broadly interpret the law? Do we want to rein-in gubernatorial administrations in the future?” Aughenbaugh posited. “Meanwhile, how do you revise the law so that future presidential administrations don’t single out a state for lawsuits two weeks before Election Day?”

Rouse said there’s valid reasons for those types of deliberations. 

“It’s more of a bigger picture with Governor Youngkin in terms of inciting fear and undermining our elections,” Rouse said of conversations he’s having with his fellow lawmakers. “We understand that this administration has been known to make mistakes.”

Rouse pointed to how the administration pulled out of ERIC, a multi-state data-sharing coalition meant to maintain voter roll accuracy — and how he vetoed legislation prompting Virginia’s return to it this year, along with other voting-related bills. The administration also mistakenly canceled over 3,000 people’s registrations last year, Rouse said. 

Can same-day voter registration and provisional ballots fix it?

Regardless of whether eligible voters were caught up in the recent purge or runs into other election-access issues, registrars have said that use of same-day registration and provisional ballots are an option that would allow them to vote on Election Day. Provisional ballots require follow-up after voting to verify a person’s address, citizenship status or other factors. 

It’s an argument Republican national and state leadership is making as a reason Youngkin’s order and the subsequent voter purges should stand.

“Even if a person entitled to vote were erroneously removed from the voter rolls and unable to respond to the Commonwealth’s outreach, they may still take advantage of same-day registration and cast a ballot,” the state’s request to the Supreme Court stated.  “No legal voters could or would be disenfranchised.”

Aughenbaugh doubts the nation’s highest court will grant Virginia’s request so close to the elections and  suspects people who have been purged may not have to resort to provisional ballots this year. 

“I don’t think there are enough (Supreme Court) justices that have the appetite to wade into that dispute less than a week before elections,” he said.