Experts pummel Supreme Court's 'wrongheaded' decision on Virginia voter purge

The Supreme Court made what may seem like a minor decision about a small group of Virginia voters, but legal experts are sounding the alarm.

After the court gave Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin the green light to pursue his purge of the voter rolls, these experts warned that this ruling ends a long-standing precedent not to have changes within 90 days of the election.

Concern among voting rights advocates is that the purge was already found to be inaccurate. The GOP lawmakers who support it have claimed that it was using recent data from the Department of Motor Vehicles to purge non-citizens accurately. Actual citizens who can prove their citizenship have been caught up in the purge, leaving them with last-minute hoops to jump through to cast a ballot.

Also Read: The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters

"This only affects a small number of people but is a wrongheaded decision in light of clear federal law," said election law expert Marc Elias.

"The truth is, existing methods for ensuring only citizens register to vote are adequate. Voters have to certify they are citizens when they register. States check before they are added to the rolls," wrote former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.

"Law Dork" Chris Geidner noted that all of the lower courts agreed that the purge was likely illegal under federal law.

Technically, he explained, the High Court is "staying the injunction pending Virginia’s appeal of the case." He remarks that the ruling "contains no explanation of why the justices took this action."

"This is a disturbing shadow docket decision, up there with the 2021 shadow docket decision allowing Texas’s S.B. 8 vigilante abortion law to go into effect despite Roe," he also said.

"This order is bad not only because of what it will do to voters in Virginia but also because of the mischief that it will invite against voters nationwide," lamented civil rights lawyer Matthew Segal on X.

Harvard Law School Professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos agreed in an X post, "Assuming the Court's decision was driven by Purcell, this situation shows why Purcell shouldn't always be dispositive. Federal law says that voter purges shouldn't happen close to an election. If a state violates that law, Purcell shouldn't immunize the state's illegal action."