The Supreme Court has agreed to temporarily pause a lower court’s order that reinstated 1,600 voters to rolls in Virginia even though an appeals court found the purge of voters occurred in violation of a “quiet” period barring systematic changes to rolls so close to Election Day.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), an ally of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, had issued an executive order in August to use data from the Department of Motor Vehicles to remove people from the state’s voter rolls. Certain individuals were supposed be notified that their registrations would be canceled if they could not confirm their citizenship within 14 days.
Youngkin’s order triggered a wave of lawsuits, including from voting rights groups and the Department of Justice. They argued that the executive order ended up unfairly removing eligible voters due to bureaucratic errors that improperly labeled some people as noncitizens.
The plaintiffs — which included the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, the League of Women Voters of Virginia, and the League of Women Voters of Virginia Education Fund, along with African Communities Together — also alleged that the purge was discriminatory, but no court has reached a decision on that claim.
The order issued Wednesday noted that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Kentanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan would have denied the request.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ordered Youngkin to reinstate 1,600 voters just days ago, after finding that many Virginians said they weren’t aware that they’d been flagged as ineligible to vote.
The “systematic” changes to rolls, Giles found, violated the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day “quiet period.” The decades-old law bars major changes to voter rolls out of consideration for real-life time constraints, as 90 days would leave little time for voters or the government to remedy problems that may arise shortly before an election.
Virginia officials appealed Giles’ order to a 4th Circuit court and asked for it to be put on hold. The appellate court was unconvinced and brushed off Virginia’s claims that Giles’ decision would essentially allow noncitizens to appear on the rolls.
Before the Supreme Court weighed in, a group of 17 Republican former lawmakers filed a letter to the high court declaring that they were opposed to Youngkin’s request for an emergency stay. Many of the lawmakers noted that they had been involved with enacting the National Voter Registration Act in 1993 and that it was specifically meant to stop what Youngkin’s executive order set into motion.
“The daily systematic removal program recently undertaken by Applicants is precisely what the NVRA’s Quiet Period Provision forbids,” the former legislators wrote in reference to that law.
“It is not a close case; it is instead a paradigmatic violation of Congress’s design. The fact that this last-minute systematic program has in fact disenfranchised eligible Virginia voters only confirms the wisdom of the NVRA’s plan and the illegality of this scheme. To hold otherwise would thwart the bipartisan congressional consensus underlying the NVRA.”
The group of Republicans included an array of former House representatives. Among them were former Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a onetime member of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot; Tom Coleman of Missouri; and Barbara Comstock of California, as well as legislators from states like Texas and Virginia.
Meanwhile, a group known as the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation filed a letter in support of the purge, arguing that “requiring Virginia to include noncitizens in its voter rolls ... dilutes lawful votes.”
The group said it “represents victims who experienced direct harm through the revocation of informed consent in healthcare contexts,” adding, “These experiences, where personal agency and consent were stripped away, reveal to Petitioners the vital importance of maintaining procedural safeguards—both in healthcare and within democratic processes—to protect individual rights and public trust.”
Efforts to challenge voter registration in two other battleground states saw setbacks Tuesday, with judges in Pennsylvania and North Carolina dealing blows to Republicans’ legal challenges.
In North Carolina, a 4th Circuit court ruled that the Republican National Committee and North Carolina GOP must keep their challenge to the registrations of 225,000 voters in federal court, marking a win for Democrats.
North Carolina Republicans have argued that the voters were registered unlawfully because they completed forms that did not require identifying information, like the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number. The GOP is asking for such people to be removed from voter rolls or to only be allowed to cast provisional ballots.
The Democratic National Committee successfully pushed to have the case moved from state to federal court. A federal judge then sent it back down to the state, saying he did not have jurisdiction to make determinations on matters involving North Carolina’s state Constitution.
But once on appeal at the 4th Circuit, judges unanimously concluded that sending the case back to the state was “improper.” With just a week to go until Election Day, the decision means that North Carolina Republicans are likely out of luck for this election season.
And in Pennsylvania, a judge has thrown out a lawsuit that congressional Republicans filed to challenge voter ID requirements for military and overseas voters.
Lawmakers — including Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry, as well as Reps. Mike Kelly, Guy Reschenthaler, Glenn “GT” Thompson and Lloyd Smucker — claimed that Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth, exceeded his power by saying that overseas voters were exempt from ID verification requirements. The lawmakers said the exemption threw the door wide open to voter fraud.
But in his ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner dismissed the challenge.
“Plaintiffs delayed too long to file their action, they lack standing, they have failed to join indispensable parties, and they have failed to articulate a viable cause of action,” Conner wrote, adding that an injunction “at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration.”