Virginia asks Supreme Court to permit voter roll purge aimed at suspected noncitizens

[BumRushDaShow]

Last edited Mon Oct 28, 2024, 12:17 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: CNN Politics

Updated 11:05 AM EDT, Mon October 28, 2024


CNN — Virginia Republican officials asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to allow the state to implement a program to remove suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls, in one of the first major voting cases to reach the high court ahead of next week’s presidential election.

The appeal has political salience as former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have seized on the case as part of a false narrative of widespread voting by people in the country illegally.

It is one of several election-related suits that have already landed at the Supreme Court or that are expected to arrive in the final days before the November 5 election. Those cases are arriving amid an incredibly close contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and as polls show widespread distrust in the Supreme Court.

The election, already underway as millions of Americans cast early votes, has prompted a flood of litigation. But a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that a 56% of registered voters say they have just some or no trust in the Supreme Court to make the right decisions on any legal cases relating to the contest.

Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/politics/virginia-supreme-court-voter-purge/index.html

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REFERENCE - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10143329580

Article updated.

Original article-

Published 10:02 AM EDT, Mon October 28, 2024


CNN — Virginia Republican officials asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to allow the state to implement a program to remove suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls in one of the first major voting cases to reach the high court ahead of next week’s presidential election.

The appeal has political salience as former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have seized on the case as part of a false narrative of widespread voting by people in the country illegally.

It is one of several election-related suits that have already landed at the Supreme Court or that are expected to arrive in the final days before the November 5 election.

Given the relatively small number of voters involved and the fact that Virginia has reliably supported Democratic presidential nominees for the past several elections, the outcome is unlikely to have an impact on the contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. But Trump has already repeatedly touted the case on social media, at one point describing a lower court’s ruling against the program as “election interference.”

[ScratchCat]

1. How would SCOTUS even have jurisdiction?

This is purely a State issue. All the State courts have said no. There is no Federal issue with The State of Virginia saying you can't purge voting rolls. I don't get it. I expect them to decline.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

3. The federal court and the federal law is what's stopping Youngkin from purging the voter rolls.

So we will see just how far the court can debase itself any further.

[Bayard]

2. "Suspected,"

Means anyone with a foreign sounding name.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

6. Or someone in another state has the same or similar name...

... they have done that in the past in other states, I forget the name of the software pushed by a Niel Bush concern out of Florida... somebody fill in the blanks here.

[azureblue]

4. this won't work, either

They have no proof to base their claim upon, besides "suspected".

[Igel]

5. The article itself says,

State officials argue the roughly 1,600 people removed from the voter rolls under the program had themselves said they weren’t citizens.

The evidence isn't on a per-person basis, but holistic based on what applicants said on DMV forms. (Apparently they were identified over the course of months or years, but only removed the first day of the 90-day exclusionary period--that's background knowledge from looking at links in DU posts from weeks ago. Why then? Dunno. The MSN article cited below makes it seem nefarious, but without checking perhaps it's just a Saturday versus Monday problem. In any event, one day earlier, no legal case would be really obviously slam dunk.)

"Evidence" part 1:

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

Charles Cooper, a lawyer for the state, said during arguments Thursday that the federal law was never intended to provide protections to noncitizens, who by definition can’t vote in federal elections.

“Congress couldn’t possibly 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 lawsuit, though, said that 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 in fact citizens — Virginia only identified this week the names and addresses of the affected individuals in response to a court order — but provided anecdotal evidence of individuals whose registrations were wrongly canceled.

So apparently those who registered with the VA DMV claimed to be non-citizens. By accident or not. Apparently some.

Rebuttal, part I:

State officials said any voter identified as a noncitizen was notified and given two weeks to dispute their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form attesting to their citizenship, their registration would not be canceled.

They could also probably vote by provisional/affidavit ballot and prove citizenship/eligibility under laws passed by our democracy within some stipulated period of time. (That's been the case where I've voted because I was also insecure about having ID the first time or two voting--OR, CA, NY, TX. Note how close together those are geographically and ideologically, from '82 to '06. Ahem. But since VA isn't in the list and I've been in TX for 20 years, who knows what VA law/federal oversight law says these days.)

No offense intended, but the article often provides information not in the headline, and often an article in week 3-4 of an issue overlooks details commonly reported in weeks 1-2 of the issue and a few minutes with our BFF Google (or DuckDuckGo, if you don't like Google ... I don't) is incredibly edifying, if only when the results come down from on high it's a good thing to have some idea of where the case starts and (later) what the legal reasoning is.