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    • Virginia is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to purge non-citizen suspects
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    Virginia is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to purge non-citizen suspects

    Online Niel Posted on

    In one Virginia county, 43 voters were purged after proving — sometimes repeatedly — that they were American citizens.

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    WASHINGTON − Virginia Republicans have asked the Supreme Court to allow him to reinstate a purging non-citizen suspects from the voter lists.

    Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares filed an emergency petition with the high court hours after a federal appeals court on Sunday upheld a the lower court’s decision to stop the cleanup.

    U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles on Friday blocked a state program that purged about 1,500 names since Aug. 7 because federal law prohibits voter purges within 90 days of an election. She also ordered the state to restore the registrations of those canceled during that period.

    Miyares told the high court that the decision violates “Virginia law and common sense.”

    He also said it would confuse voters, overload voting machines and administrators in Virginia and likely lead non-citizens to incorrectly believe they are allowed to vote.

    Miyares said the Supreme Court has until Tuesday to intervene because the district court ordered Virginia to comply by Wednesday.

    Voting rights groups fought the state policy because it removed naturalized citizens from the rolls if they had previously declared themselves noncitizens on auto forms. Governor Glenn Youngkin’s program notified non-citizen suspects that they would be removed if they did not assert their citizenship within 14 days.

    But because it could have been years since the motor vehicle declarations, advocacy groups and the Justice Department have challenged the program in court, arguing that naturalized citizens are being removed from voter rolls.

    Advocacy groups cited Prince William County Clerk Eric Olsen as saying at a Sept. 30 board of elections meeting that his office reviewed 162 people listed as noncitizens in the state’s computer system and found that 43 voted previously. But his office checked and found that all 43 had verified their citizenship — some as many as five times — but were still removed from the voter rolls.

    “For the second time in three days, a federal court has ruled that Virginia’s purge of eligible citizens is illegal,” said Ryan Snow, an attorney with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the law. “We urge the Supreme Court to stop this madness and make it clear that it is unacceptable to block eligible citizens from voting.”

    Studies have found that negligible numbers of suspected noncitizens vote, likely because of the threat of criminal charges and deportation if caught. Studies by Brennan Center for Justice and the Libertarian Cato Institute they found that the vote of non-citizens is essentially non-existent.

    But Republicans have made rooting out suspected non-citizens a centerpiece of their voter integrity push this year.

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