The U.S. Supreme Court paused a lower court ruling on Wednesday that blocked Virginia from removing approximately 1,600 non-citizens from its voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election. The Supreme Court’s ruling will temporarily allow the state to move forward with its plan to remove the non-citizens from its voter rolls.
According to CBS News, the Supreme Court’s order came after Virginia officials asked the Supreme Court to pause a lower court’s injunction that prevented the state from removing non-citizens from its voter rolls under a program that was launched 90 days before Election Day in August. The outlet noted that the National Voter Registration Act requires states to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls 90 days prior to federal elections.
Wednesday’s Supreme Court order stated, “The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is granted.” The order also indicated that Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor would have denied the request to pause the lower court’s ruling.
Virginia officials asked the Supreme Court to temporarily pause the lower court’s ruling by Tuesday, arguing that the district court’s order violated the state’s law and “common sense” and that it mandated “a variety of disruptive measures.”
State officials claimed that the lower court’s ruling would negatively impact “Virginia’s sovereignty, confuse her voters, overload her election machinery and administrators, and likely lead noncitizens to think they are permitted to vote, a criminal offense that will cancel the franchise of eligible voters.”
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CBS News reported that Virginia’s request came after the Biden-Harris administration’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state over Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive order regarding the removal of ineligible voters ahead of the 2024 election. The Justice Department claimed that Virginia’s voter removal program violated the National Voter Registration Act’s provision that prevents states from conducting voter removal programs less than 90 days from an election.
According to CBS News, the Justice Department’s request for a preliminary injunction against the state was granted last Friday by U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles and upheld by a panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on Sunday.
Following the injunction, Virginia officials warned that pausing the removal of non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls would “impose significant cost, confusion, and hardship upon Virginia, creating a massive influx of work for its registrars in the critical week before the election, and likely confusing noncitizens into believing that they are eligible to vote,” according to CBS News.
