The Biden administration’s Department of Justice is suing states and towns across the country in an effort to thwart election integrity measures ahead of the presidential election, resulting in pushback from election integrity advocates.
The DOJ has sued Virginia, Alabama, and rural Wisconsin towns over the removal of non-citizens from voter rolls and switching to only paper ballots and hand-counting. Some of the jurisdictions are fighting back, arguing that they are following the law as they work to ensure election integrity.
The Justice Department sued Virginia earlier this month over removing non-citizens from its rolls ahead of the Nov. 5 elections. A federal judge in Virginia on Friday ordered the commonwealth to place non-citizens back on its voter rolls. The judge ruled that removing the registered voters from the rolls violated federal law, WRIC reported.
The suit was against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Virginia State Board of Elections, and the Virginia Commissioner of Elections for allegedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The NVRA prevents states from using systematic programs to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, according to the DOJ.
While Virginia argued that the non-citizens removed from the voter rolls are ineligible to vote, the judge ruled that they were illegally removed too close to the election.
“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 GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in a statement. “Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.”
“This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-Governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal–and the ultimate failsafe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens to cast a provisional ballot,” Youngkin continued. “This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.
“Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency stay of the injunction,” he added.
