Dennis Henson has been a registered voter his entire adult life.

So he wasn’t expecting the letter, dated Aug. 28, telling him his voter registration would expire because he was identified as a noncitizen.

Henson, of Lynchburg, believes she mistakenly forgot to mark her citizenship status on the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles form when she renewed her driver’s license in July.

“I obviously missed a box,” Henson told a Cardinal News reporter Friday as he stood on the steps of his Hill City home, taking a break from painting and other home improvement work.

Failure to check the citizenship box or identify as a non-citizen triggers a process where the DMV notifies the Department of Elections, which then notifies the local registrar’s office, which then sends a warning letter to the resident to tell them that their registration is at issue. to be cancelled. The resident has 14 days to respond.

Henson wanted to vote on Election Day. He has a special red shirt he wears to the polls to show his support for the GOP: “I’m 100% Republican, Donald Trump.”

So he sent a reply by post within the required 14 days. He suspects the postal service didn’t send it to the Lynchburg County Clerk’s Office in time because he received another notice, dated Sept. 19, that said his voter registration had been canceled.

On Oct. 14, Henson went in person to the clerk’s office on Kemper Street and filled out paperwork to re-register to vote.

“Everything was straightened out,” he said.

Since Aug. 7, a dozen voters have been removed from Lynchburg’s voter rolls after they, like Henson, were identified by the DMV as noncitizens.

Lawrence Otey, a longtime voter who lives in Roanoke, accidentally checked the “non-US citizen” box when he renewed his driver’s license. Then it was announced that he had been removed from the rolls.

Otey’s brick house sits on a steep hill in a friendly neighborhood, the kind of place you’d answer the door when a stranger knocks. He went outside in a Virginia Tech sweatshirt, noting how lucky we were with the weather—over 70 degrees in late October, two weeks before Election Day.

“I voted from Jimmy Carter,” Otey said. He laughed about his mistake – “You don’t get old,” he said. Otey went to the DMV with various forms of identification to resolve the issue, so he was able to vote early.

Like Henson in Lynchburg, Otey wasn’t the only one to learn he’d been declared a noncitizen. In Roanoke, 32 voters were removed from the rolls, while 15 were removed in Roanoke County. Four were removed in Danville and one was removed in Bristol.

Those whose registration was recently canceled after being bureaucratically declared “non-citizens” are getting a reprieve, thanks to a recent court ruling.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Virginia Department of Elections to reinstate about 1,600 voters who were removed from the rolls after they were “declared noncitizens” following an Aug. 7 executive order by Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

The ruling, handed down by Judge Patricia Giles of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, said Youngkin and the Department of Elections must stop the systematic removal of voters from the rolls. Also, the Department of Elections must reinstate those who were removed after the issuance of the executive order within five days of its issuance. Written notification is also required to be sent to each voter who was removed as of August 7 that their voter registration has been reinstated.

According to the decision, the Electoral Department is still allowed to remove voters from the lists at the request of the registrant, on the grounds of criminal conviction or mental incapacity or due to the death of a registrant.

The lawsuit against Youngkin’s executive order

Voter rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice filed lawsuits against the Commonwealth and the Department of Elections on Oct. 11, which sought to stop Youngkin’s executive order.

That caused a political firestorm during an already fraught election cycle, with claims of “interference” leveled against the DOJ by former President Donald Trump, Republican presidential nominee and other GOP members.

Data from the DMV was used to regularly remove people who identified themselves as noncitizens from voter rolls before Youngkin’s executive order. Seven people were removed from the Lynchburg rolls after being declared non-citizens in 2024 before the August executive order.

The suit alleged that Youngkin’s executive order violated a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to complete systematic programs to remove the names of ineligible voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election. That section of the law, known as the Quiet Period Provision, applies to programs that seek to remove people from voter registration rolls based on their perceived failure to meet initial eligibility requirements, such as citizenship, at the time of registration , according to a statement. by the DOJ.

Youngkin’s executive order, issued exactly 90 days before the Nov. 5 election, required the Elections Department to verify the legal presence and identity of voters daily using DMV data.

Voting rights groups have argued that the use of DMV data could lead to the erroneous removal of US citizens from voter rolls. And, in a court filing, they pointed to at least three individual cases where this occurred following the executive order.

In a statement on Friday, Youngkin said the people removed from the lists had “self-identified” as non-citizens.

Reactions to the decision

On Friday afternoon, Virginia Election Commissioner Susan Beals, Attorney General Jason Miyares and other state officials appealed Giles’ decision to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

Miyares called the lawsuit “harassment” and “weaponizing” the DOJ against the community in a statement before the appeal was filed.

“More troubling is the Biden-Harris administration’s open practice of weaponizing the legal system against the enemies of so-called progress. That is the definition of the law,” he said.

Youngkin argued that his executive order followed a state law that was signed nearly two decades ago.

“This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove citizens from voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal — and ultimate security of registration in the same day for American Citizens to vote provisionally,” Youngkin said in a statement. “This law has been used in every Republican and Democratic presidential election since it was passed 18 years ago.”

Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, a Democrat, agreed with Friday’s ruling that Youngkin’s executive order violated established law.

“This purge was a direct attempt to disenfranchise eligible American citizens, and I commend the courts for stepping in,” he said in a statement. “Voting is sacred and our forefathers bled for our right to it. It is unthinkable to see our own governor and attorney general making a concerted effort to undermine that right.”

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