Virginia must restore 1,600 voter records deleted before election, judge rules

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A federal judge ordered Virginia on Friday restoring over 1,600 voter records which she said were illegally purged over the past two months in an effort to prevent citizens from voting.

U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles granted the injunction filed against Virginia election officials by the Justice Department, which claimed voter registrations were wrongly canceled during a 90-day quiet period before the November election that restricts states from making large-scale changes to their voter rolls.

State officials said they would appeal. The decision also drew criticism from former President Donald Trumpwho posted on social media that the decision “is a totally unacceptable travesty”.

“Only American citizens should be allowed to vote,” Trump wrote.

In issuing the ruling Friday, Giles bristled at the suggestion that he would restore voting rights to non-citizens. She said the state had no evidence that the purged voters were not citizens, but went ahead and canceled their registrations anyway, in violation of federal law.

The Department of Justicet and private groupsincluding the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were canceled were actually citizens whose registrations were canceled due to bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes, such as a wrongly checked box on a form.

Justice Department attorney Sejal Jhaveri said during an all-day hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Va., that that’s precisely why federal law prevents states from implementing systematic changes to voter rolls in the 90 days before an election. , “to prevent the harm of having eligible. remote voters at a time when it is hard to fix”.

Giles said Friday that the state is not completely barred from removing citizens from voting rolls during the 90-day quiet period, but that it must do so on an individual basis rather than through the automated, systematic, staffed program state.

State officials unsuccessfully argued that the revoked registrations followed careful procedures targeting people who explicitly identified themselves as noncitizens to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Charles Cooper, an attorney for the state, said during Thursday’s hearing that the federal law was never intended to protect non-citizens, who by definition cannot vote in federal elections.

“Congress could not have intended to prevent the removal … of persons who were never eligible to vote in the first place,” Cooper argued.

The plaintiffs who brought the suit, however, said many people are wrongly identified as noncitizens by the DMV simply by checking the wrong box on a form. They were unable to identify exactly how many of the 1,600 purged voters are actually citizens—Virginia only this week identified the names and addresses of affected people in response to a court order—but provided anecdotal evidence of people whose records were wrongly cancelled.

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as non-citizens may be citizens, but said restoring them to the rolls means, in all likelihood, “hundreds of non-citizens will be back on those rolls. If a non-citizen votes. , nullifies a legal vote, and that’s bad,” he said.

Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkinissued an executive order in August requiring daily DMV data checks against voter rolls to identify non-citizens.

State officials said any voter identified as a non-citizen was notified and given two weeks to appeal their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form proving their citizenship, their registration would not be cancelled.

Before Youngkin’s executive order, the state conducted monthly checks of voter rolls against DMV data under a state law passed in 2006.

Youngkin said the Justice Department wrongly targeted him for following a law that was followed by his predecessors, including Democrats, even though they did not go the extra step of ordering daily checks as it did in his order executive.

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: Just eleven days before the presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to put more than 1,500 people — who self-identified as non-citizens — back on the voter rolls,” he Youngkin said in a statement after Friday’s hearing.

Giles questioned the timing of Youngkin’s executive order, which was issued on Aug. 7, the very beginning of the 90-day quiet period required by federal law.

“It is no coincidence that this was announced on exactly the 90th day” of the quiet period, she said from the bank on Friday.

Her order calls for voter registrations to be restored for all those canceled as a result of Youngkin’s executive order and for letters to be sent within five days notifying those voters of their restored status. The letters will also include a cautionary note informing those individuals that, if they are indeed non-citizens, they are prohibited from voting under federal law.

The plaintiffs asked the judge to grant those voters an extension to request ballots, but Giles rejected that request, saying it would lead to confusion.

Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares issued a statement after Friday’s hearing criticizing the decision.

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” he said. “However, today a court — urged by the Biden-Harris Justice Department — ordered Virginia to put the names of non-citizens back on the voter rolls, just days before the presidential election.”

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who alerted Justice Department officials to the removals. praised the decision.

“Governor Youngkin’s purges served only one purpose—to target thousands of voting citizens of the Commonwealth. That stops today,” he said.

Nearly 6 million Virginians are registered to vote.

A similar lawsuit was filed in Alabama and a federal judge there itlast week ordered the state to restore eligibility to more than 3,200 voters who were deemed ineligible non-citizens. Testimony from state officials in that case showed that about 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were inactive were actually legally registered citizens.

The Associated Press contributed to this report