Judges shoot down Youngkin’s attempt to cleanse Virginia’s voter rolls

Federal judges have ordered Virginia to restore roughly 1,600 names to voting rolls, shooting down Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s attempt to cleanse the lists of people the state believes to be ineligible noncitizens.

A district court issued the order Friday and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely accepted that ruling in a decision Sunday, leaving the state staring at a Hail Mary attempt to rope the Supreme Court into the fray.

Voting rights groups and the federal Justice Department challenged the removals, saying they violated a federal law that bars large-scale changes to the voting rolls within a 90-day “quiet” period before a national election.

Mr. Youngkin’s lawyers had argued the law only applies to actual voters. They said noncitizens are ineligible to vote, so removing them isn’t covered by the law.

The appeals court rejected that reading, saying Virginia was mixing different parts of the law together.

“That is not how courts interpret statutes,” the appeals court ruled.

Virginia Republicans, who pushed the purge, said the courts are knowingly putting some noncitizens back on the rolls just days before an election.

“Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities,” Mr. Youngkin said Friday.

Former President Donald Trump called the attempt to restore the names “blatantly un-American” and ”election interference.”

But the three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit said Mr. Youngkin was misstating the issue.

The judges said the state doesn’t know enough to say with any certainty that the names it culled from its lists were in fact noncitizens. Therefore, the judges said, ordering their restoration isn’t automatically putting illegal voters back.

The appeals court sustained most of a preliminary injunction issued Friday by District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, who sits in the federal courthouse in Alexandria.

Mr. Youngkin has already signaled his willingness to take the issue to the Supreme Court.

The case is one of a series of battles playing out in states over attempts to clean rolls of noncitizens.

GOP-led states have announced thousands of names of suspected noncitizens they’ve cleansed in recent months, complying with the wishes of Mr. Trump and national Republicans.

Democrats argue the threat of noncitizen voting is overblown and the bigger danger lies in blocking valid voters away from the ballot box.

In the case of Virginia, Mr. Youngkin ordered election officials in August to conduct daily checks of their voter rolls looking for ineligible voters, including those who aren’t citizens.

The Justice Department said names removed in response to Mr. Youngkin’s order violated the 90-day pre-election quiet period — and indeed were sometimes wrong.

In court documents, the Justice Department said local election officials were ousting legitimate voters. As of Oct. 16, for example, Loudoun County had removed 102 voters during the quiet period, but three voters later submitted affirmations of their citizenship and eight re-registered, the feds said.

The key question before the courts is whether Mr. Youngkin’s order qualified as a systematic removal of voters.

The appeals court said Virginia has acknowledged that its actions were systematic but challenged the notion that the law applied to noncitizens because they cannot be voters.

The appeals court judges said that’s the wrong reading of the 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act often known as Motor-Voter.

The appellate judges left most of Judge Giles’ order in place, but did erase her demand that Virginia provide training to election officials and poll workers throughout the state to explain the name removals and restorations.

The appeals court said that the order was too vague and risked “undue confusion.”

The courts’ action doesn’t affect 6,303 names Virginia had already culled from January 2022 to July 2024, or before the current federal election quiet period.

Virginia says it uses voters’ own records — usually a driver’s license application, where someone is required to state citizenship status — to flag ineligible voters.

Election officials then attempted two follow-up contacts before erasing the name, the state’s lawyers said in court briefs. Those efforts, the state said, show that the purge was not systematic and doesn’t violate the quiet period.

But a lawyer for the voting groups challenging the state said she had encountered a Henrico County voter, a “lifelong citizen” and Republican voter, who was removed by the purge and who said she never got any notifications.

She went to cast an in-person early vote this month and was told she was removed because the U.S. citizen box wasn’t checked on her most recent driver’s license application. She was turned away and had to re-register.