The Supreme Court Just Carved an Outrageous Loophole Into a Major Voting Rights Law [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/us-presidential-election-supreme-court-virginia-voter-rolls-purge.html

The Supreme Court decided Wednesday that at least 1,600 people—including some known to be U.S. citizens with every right to vote—can be removed from Virginia’s voter rolls before Election Day. The conservative supermajority’s order, issued on the shadow docket, essentially nullified a landmark federal law that bars last-minute voter purges. All three liberal justices dissented. Ominously, the court’s intervention signals to other states that they can commence purges at the eleventh hour, suppressing the vote through legal gamesmanship that Congress sought to ban.

Wednesday’s order is a major victory for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, in their quest to expand states’ authority to cancel voter registrations just before voting begins. And it’s a clear violation of federal law. A federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, outlawed any state “program” that “systematically” removes “ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” starting 90 days before a federal election. Congress enacted the statute in recognition of the obvious fact that these purges often caught up eligible voters, as well, creating confusion and threatening civil rights. Nonetheless, Youngkin issued an executive order exactly 90 days before the Nov. 5 election mandating a daily set of voter purges.

Youngkin claimed that the program went after only noncitizens. But he was lying: His program swept in U.S. citizens in two ways. First, it targeted Virginians who checked a box on a DMV form indicating that they were noncitizens. But due to poor design of this form, a startlingly large number of citizens inadvertently check this box. Moreover, many foreign nationals who checked the box years ago have since become naturalized U.S. citizens who may, of course, vote like any other citizen. Second, Youngkin’s program compared the names of alleged noncitizens on the voter rolls with a database of noncitizens maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. It then removed voters whose names purportedly appeared in the database. But this database is, by the government’s own admission, incomplete and imperfect, and comparing its list with a state’s voter rolls can easily lead to false matches.

These flaws are not speculation: Reporters have already found U.S. citizens caught up in Youngkin’s purge, to their immense surprise. Attorneys opposing the program have also identified a number of citizens flagged for removal by the purge. If these citizens want to vote, they’ll now need to reregister at the polls (if they bring the proper documentation), cast a provisional ballot, and hope officials decide to count it.

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