The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to purge about 1,600 people from its voter rolls, handing a temporary victory to Republican officials in the state who said the move was necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting.
The decision was provisional as the case moves forward, though it will apply to the election next week. The order, which did not include a vote count, gave no reasoning and was unsigned, as is typical in cases decided on the emergency docket. But it noted that Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, would have denied the state’s request to continue the voter purge.
The case is among a handful of election-related disputes to reach the Supreme Court in the final days before the election. On Tuesday, the justices batted away a bid Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped his independent campaign for the White House in August, to remove his name from the ballots in two crucial battleground states, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The voter dispute in Virginia arose in the months before the election, when Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, signed an executive order to hasten the removal of suspected noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls. In fact, studies show that noncitizens voting is extremely rare, though Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, have continued to deploy the claim.
The Justice Department and civil rights groups had pushed back against the plan, concerned that it would ultimately remove eligible voters during a hotly contested presidential election. They pointed to a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, that restricts such purges in the period immediately before a federal election.
A federal trial court judge sided with the Justice Department and advocacy groups, ordering the state to reinstate the roughly 1,600 voters that it had removed from the rolls. The state, the judge added, should stop “continuing any systematic program intended to remove the names of ineligible voters” until the election. A federal appeals court agreed.
Virginia appealed to the Supreme Court this week, asking the court to temporarily reinstate the program.
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