U.S. Supreme Court suspends order that state must put noncitizens on voter rolls
The U.S. Supreme Court has stepped into a fight in Virginia, stopping a lower court’s order that the state add some 1,600 noncitizens back onto the voter rolls.
Fox News reports the decision by the high court was to take up a challenge from Virginia on an emergency basis.
The lower courts had demanded that the state reinstate hundreds of noncitizens to the state’s voter rolls.
Fox described the development as a victory for Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“We are pleased by the Supreme Court’s order today,” the governor explained in a statement distributed on the situation.
️BREAKING: The Supreme Court rules 6-3 to allow Virginia to remove illegal noncitizens from its voting rolls, lifting the order by a Virginia federal judge to reinstate noncitizens to the voter rolls. pic.twitter.com/uaEvRZU5lb
— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) October 30, 2024
The fight is over whether a process in the state, to remove people identified as noncitizens, often by their own identification, from voter rolls.
Meanwhile, the National Voter Registration Act bans “systemic” removals during a 90-day period before an election.
The Joe Biden Department of Justice had sued the state, among multiple attacks on election integrity laws it has launched in recent days, declining to recognize the state’s process is “individualized” and meets the requirements of state and federal law.
The state had identified those on the voter rolls without citizenship and told them to prove their citizenship or be removed.
Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares told the Supreme Court the NVRA does not extend to protections for ‘self-identified noncitizens.”
And he said the state’s process is “individualized.”
Meanwhile, attorneys general from all 26 Republican-led states joined Virginia in its fight in filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, backing its assertion that the removal program was conducted on an “individualized” basis, and further, that the Justice Department’s reading of the protections granted under NVRA are overly broad and do not apply to noncitizens.
It was a Biden-appointed judge, District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, who claimed that Virginia’s state program to work on keeping its voter rolls clean was “systemic,” not “individual.”
Her claim is that because of her determination, the rolls were cleaned within 90 days of an election, and that’s in violation of the National Voter Registration Act.
It was the Biden administration, which has run a program of open borders for the nation for nearly four years now, removing obstacles that would prevent illegal aliens from simply walking onto U.S. land and taking advantage of the multitude of social and financial benefits programs, that sued the state for trying to remove those who are not eligible to vote.
Youngkin’s order requiring the updates of voter lists was based on a 2006 state law signed by Tim Kaine, a Democrat who then was the state’s governor.