Virginia begged the Supreme Court on Monday to step in and allow the state to carry out its removal of 1,600 names of suspected noncitizens from its voting rolls.
Lower courts have ruled that Virginia’s attempt to purge the names violates a 1993 federal law that bars systematic voter-roll cleaning in the 90 days before a federal election — what’s known as the “quiet period.”
But state Attorney General Jason Miyares says that law applied to eligible voters, not to ineligible people such as those lacking citizenship.
The Department of Justice and voting rights groups who challenged the state say Virginia made some mistakes in erasing the names of at least three actual citizens.
And the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in favor of the challengers on Sunday, said Virginia can’t know for certain that the names it erased “were in fact noncitizens.”