The plan violated a 90-day quiet period preventing systematic changes before an election, the judge said.
ALEXANDRIA, Va.—A federal judge in Virginia has halted the commonwealth’s recent program to purge noncitizens from its voter rolls on an expedited basis.
Virginia’s program, announced on Aug. 7 by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, constituted a “clear violation” of the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA’s) prohibition on systematic attempts to clean up its voter rolls 90 days before an election, Judge Patricia Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia said during a hearing on Oct. 25.
Giles gave her order orally from the bench after a hearing on Oct. 24, during which the Justice Department and private plaintiffs urged her to issue a preliminary injunction. The order comes just 11 days before voters head to the polls in November and has raised questions about pre-election changes from both judges and state officials.
Youngkin responded by vowing to appeal Giles decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
“Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls,” Youngkin said on the social media platform X.
Giles’s order requires Virginia to issue guidance for counties to restore a list of individuals whose registrations had been subject to the program. During her remarks on Oct. 25, Giles said that eligible voters had been cancelled because of the program. She also raised concern that the commonwealth left no room for individualized inquiry — raising concern, for example, that individuals may have mistakenly told the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which supplies data for Youngkin’s program, that they weren’t citizens.
Her order expires after election day and does not prohibit Virginia from attempting systematic removals of noncitizens outside of the 90-day period outlined by federal law. Nor does it prevent Virginia from attempting to remove individuals through individualized investigations into whether they were noncitizens.
Charles Cooper, an attorney representing Virginia, urged the judge to consider the potential confusion an injunction might inflict on the commonwealth’s election administration.
By Sam Dorman
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