BREAKING: Supreme Court allows Virginia to remove non-citizens from voter rolls

The order in the pending case came down 6-3, and will allow the state to comply with their own long-standing law to purge non-citizens from their voter rolls. Attorney General Merrick Garland had claimed that Virginia was violating federal election law by continuing to purge voting rolls within 90 days of an election.

A judge ruled that Virginia must stop removing non-citizens and must notify those who were removed that they are eligible to vote in the upcoming election. Governor Glenn Youngin appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, and the Court ruled in favor of Virginia. The law Virginia was complying with in removing the voters has been in place since 2006.

"The application for stay presented to the The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is granted. The October 25, 2024 order of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia... is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and disposition of a petition for write of certiorari, if such writ is timely sought."

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have granted the Biden-Harris administration's request to allow those non-citizens to vote in the coming election.

Youngkin reacted to the ruling, saying: "We are pleased by the Supreme Court’s order today. This is a victory for commonsense and election fairness. I am grateful for the work of Attorney General

@JasonMiyaresVA on this critical fight to protect the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens. Clean voter rolls are one important part of a comprehensive approach we are taking to ensure the fairness of our elections. Virginians also know that we have paper ballots, counting machines not connected to the internet, a strong chain of custody process, signature verification, monitored and secured drop boxes, and a 'triple check' vote counting process to tabulate results. Virginians can cast their ballots on Election Day knowing that Virginia’s elections are fair, secure, and free from politically-motivated interference."

The trouble began with a suit from the Biden-Harris DOJ, under Garland, against Virginia, claiming that the state was not permitted under the National Voter Registration Act, which bans removals of names from voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Virginia has its own law that says that non-citizens are to be removed from voter rolls after those persons are given three chances to either correct the error or confirm their status as non-citizens.

The DOJ "filed a lawsuit against the State of Virginia, Virginia State Board of Elections and Virginia Commissioner of Elections to challenge a systematic state program aimed at removing voters from its election rolls too close to the Nov. 5 general election." The DOJ said that Virginia's practice of creating daily updates to the voter lists, to both remove and add voters based on eligibility, was a "systematic voter removal program."

The Virginia DMV registers voters automatically when they receive a driving license. Afterwards, it sends a list of those persons who checked off a box saying they are not citizens to the state to make sure they are not included on voter rolls.

Youngkin pushed back against the DOJ and the ruling, saying "Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls."

Virginia is now permitted to remove those persons and prevent them from voting, should they seek to do so.