U.S. citizens were removed from Virginia’s controversial purge

An Attorney’s Report on the Failure of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to Add a U.S. Citizen to Their Voter Rolls

The lawyers denied in court filings that Virginians who left their citizenship blank at the Department of Motor Vehicles were flagged to be removed from the voter rolls.

It is unknown at this point what the citizenship status is of all of the 1,600 voters. There is no way to check against U.S. citizens. Lawyers representing civil rights groups in the lawsuit have been attempting to contact everyone on the list.

Dorman said most people she’s spoken to don’t know they were removed from the voter rolls. Either they got a flier from the government or they didn’t, and they thought it was a scam.

Dorman and her colleagues have spoken with other U.S. citizens who visited the DMV right before they received cancellation notices from election officials.

She likely failed to mark a box that she was a U.S. citizen, because afterwards, she received a letter from her county election office notifying her that information from the DMV indicated that she “may not be a U.S. citizen.” The notice asked her to affirm her citizenship, which she did, and then she mailed back the form.

Virginia voters were wrongly flagged as potential non-citizens when they went to the DMV, according to Eric Olsen, director of elections for Prince William County.

As for Nadra Wilson, she arranged to take off early from work so that she could go to her county board of elections and straighten out her voter registration.

In May, the records of people who had been removed from the rolls under this program were reviewed. He said that each of the 43 people in that group had previously voted, and that they all confirmed on prior records that they were US citizens.

He said county offices must send notices to the people flagged by the state if they do not respond by the 14 day deadline.

The application for the driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles contains boxes that have to be checked to see if someone is a citizen. People making mistakes or not seeing the information lend themselves to that.

Wilson wasn’t quite sure about the letter. Wilson told NPR that she is a citizen, and she showed her American passport as proof.

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Shaw called it “outrageous” that the state was removing voters like her “so close to the election” and gave so little time for voters to correct the mistake. Shaw said, “I can’t believe this has happened.”

Shaw, who is a registered voter in Virginia, said that she recently updated her voter registration and found the form to be poor design.

On Aug. 7, exactly 90 days before Election Day, Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order expediting the removal of noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls. The state maintained that there were people removed from the program because they weren’t eligible to vote.

Trump has mischaracterized the Justice Department’s lawsuit by claiming the agency is aiming to put “Illegal Voters” back on Virginia’s rolls and “CHEAT” in the upcoming election. There is no evidence to support the claim.

About 1,600 voter registration were canceled, but a federal district court agreed and ordered Virginia to restore them. The appeals court upheld the order. The state appealed to the Supreme Court, requesting permission to strike voters in 90 days prior to the election.

The lower court’s decision against Virginia was agreed with by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The state then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court’s High Court Decision Deciding Virginia’s Voter Removal Program Violations the National Voter Registration Act

Wilson countered that Youngkin is “not correct” in how he has characterized the program given that it has also ensnared U.S. citizens like her. She described the state program as “very, very unfair.”

The U.S. Supreme Court could rule as early as Tuesday afternoon on an emergency request to block a lower court ruling that orders the state to restore to Virginia’s rolls Wilson and some 1,600 other registered voters. A voter removal program, the lower court found, purged them from the state’s registration list in violation of federal law. Glenn Youngkin, the state’s Republican governor, said the program removes noncitizens who are ineligible to vote because of a 2006 state law. He issued an executive order in August ordering election officials to remove suspected non citizens from their rolls on a daily basis.

Under the National Voter Registration Act, during the 90 days before an election, states must pause certain kinds of voter list maintenance programs that systematically remove voters to ensure mistakes aren’t made too close to the election. The so-called quiet period began this year on Aug. 7, the same day Youngkin issued his executive order.

The high court is being asked to decide if Virginia’s program violated federal law by systematically removing voters too close to a federal election.

Nadra Wilson of Lynchburg, Va., was concerned and confused when she received a letter in the mail from local election officials notifying her that her U.S. citizenship was in question.

The challengers said Virginia’s voter purge did what the federal law was intended to prevent, that was to remove eligible voters who hadn’t been told they were ineligible to vote.

The state contended that the lower courts “misinterpreted the NVRA.” They argued that the “quiet period” cannot apply to noncitizens, since they are already ineligible to vote. Even if the “quiet period” did apply here, the state argued, the program was sufficiently individualized, not systematic.

The significance of court’s the ruling is more a matter of the signal it sends than how the court’s action will effect the election in Virginia, where polls show Vice President Harris well ahead of former President Trump. The signal it sends is that if a majority of the justices had an appetite for election appeals like this one, they almost certainly will have an appetite for election appeals from more contentious states in the coming days and weeks.