Judge orders Virginia to restore 1,600 voter registrations cancelled in effort to purge noncitizens

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (AP):

A United States federal judge on Friday ordered Virginia to restore more than 1,600 voter registrations that she said were illegally purged in the last two months in an effort to stop noncitizens from voting.

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

State officials said they will appeal.

The Justice Departmen t and private groups, including the League of Women Voters, said many of the 1,600 voters whose registrations were cancelled were in fact citizens whose registrations were cancelled because of bureaucratic errors or simple mistakes like a mischecked box on a form.

Justice Department lawyer Sejal Jhaveri said during an all-day injunction hearing Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, that’s precisely why federal law prevents states from implementing systematic changes to the voter rolls in the 90 days before an election, “to prevent the harm of having eligible voters removed in a period where it’s hard to remedy”.

Giles said Friday that the state is not completely prohibited from removing noncitizens from the voting rolls during the 90-day quiet period, but that it must do so on an individualised basis rather than the automated, systematic programme employed by the state.

State officials argued unsuccessfully that the cancelled 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.

WRONGLY CANCELLED

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 cancelled.

Cooper acknowledged that some of the 1,600 voters identified by the state as noncitizens may well be citizens, but he said restoring all of them to the rolls means that in all likelihood “there’s going to hundreds of noncitizens back on those rolls. If a noncitizen votes, it cancels out a legal vote. And that is a harm,” he said.