Twenty-six Republican attorneys general joined Virginia on Monday in urging the Supreme Court to halt a lower court decision that restored the voting rights of 1,600 residents.
The amicus brief backs Virginia’s contention that the ruling is overly broad and lacks standing under a provision of the National Voter Registration Act (NRVA), which orders states to halt all ‘systematic’ voter roll maintenance 90 days before an election. It now has the support of every Republican-led U.S. state, giving it outsize attention in the final stretch before the election.
In the amicus brief, attorneys general urged the court to grant Virginia’s emergency motion and ‘restore the status quo,’ noting that doing so ‘would comply with the law and enable Virginia to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming election.’
The states also sided with Virginia in objecting to the Justice Department’s reading of NVRA protections, which they said was overly broad.
Moreover, they said, the law in place in Virginia was not designed to ‘systematically’ remove residents from the voter rolls, as Justice Department officials cited in their lawsuit earlier this month.
The Justice Department had argued the removals were conducted too close to the Nov. 5 elections and violated the ‘quiet period’ provision under NVRA. That contention was backed by a federal judge in Alexandria, which ordered the affected voters back on the rolls, and upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the amicus brief, lawyers describe the ruling as a ‘sweeping interpretation of the NVRA’ that ‘converts a procedural statute into a substantive federal regulation of voter qualifications in elections—an interpretation that would raise serious questions about the constitutionality of the NVRA itself.’
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has insisted the voters were removed legally and that the removal process is based on precedent from a 2006 state law enacted by then-Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat.
That process compared the state Department of Motor Vehicles’ noncitizens list to its list of registered voters. Those without citizenship were then informed that their voter registration would be canceled unless they could prove their citizenship in 14 days.
Youngkin and Virginia Attorney General Jason S. Miyares have argued the lower court rulings are ‘individualized’ and not systematic, as the Justice Department alleged earlier this month.
They argued that restoring them just days before an election is likely to inject new chaos into the voting process – an argument backed by the group of Republican states in the Monday filing.
‘This Court should reject Respondents’ effort to change the rules in the middle of the game and restore the status quo ante,’ they wrote. ‘The Constitution leaves decisions about voter qualifications to the people of Virginia. And the people of Virginia have decided that noncitizens are not permitted to vote.’