Is this election interference by the Department of Justice, or is Virginia not allowed to take noncitizens who are registered to vote off the rolls?

Late Friday, the DOJ announced it was filing a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia to prevent them from purging anyone off the voter rolls. The claim by activist groups, which filed their lawsuit against Virginia earlier in the week, is that the National Voting Rights Act does not allow anyone to be removed less than 90 days before an election.

The Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia filed the suit Monday in federal court.

In August, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed Executive Order 35 — aimed at preventing non-citizens from voting in Virginia.

But the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia argue it’s too close to election day to purge voters from the list.

“The National Voting Rights Act does not permit people being removed from the rolls 90 days prior to a federal election,” said Joan Porte, president of the League of Women Voters of Virginia.

They claim some folks the board is calling “non-citizens” could be actual U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

They said the order could remove people who became naturalized citizens, if the Department of Motor Vehicles does not have that updated citizenship information.

“If they’ve had any sort of change with their citizenship status over that course in time, they may now be a lawful voter, and they’re still getting flagged by the DMV as being a non-citizen and subject to removal,” said Anna Dorman, a counsel at Protect Democracy.

This is the same argument that the DOJ is using against Virginia – and is also suing Alabama for the same reason.

The suit comes about two months after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the state’s Department of Elections to conduct daily updates to its voting list, including comparing the list of identified “noncitizens” to the state’s existing list of registered voters.

Local officials are required to notify people found on both lists that their voter registration will be canceled if they fail to respond to the notice and affirm their citizenship within 14 days. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.

According to the Justice Department, some of the people identified as noncitizens have U.S. citizenship, leading to some voter registrations being canceled unnecessarily.

“The Commonwealth’s unlawful actions here have likely confused, deterred, and removed U.S. citizens who are fully eligible to vote —the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision,” the DOJ said in its suit, referring to the purging of voter rolls within 90 days of Election Day.

During a previous effort to purge voter rolls of noncitizens in Virginia’s Prince William County, which took place before July, 43 of the 162 people identified as noncitizens were U.S. citizens, according to the Justice Department’s lawsuit.

This is the second DOJ lawsuit in the past month against a state for alleged violations of a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that says that, while states have the prerogative to clean their voter rolls for various reasons, they cannot conduct systematic removals so close to a federal election as those predominantly affected are often naturalized Americans.

The DOJ sued the State of Alabama in September over alleged violations of the so-called Quiet Provision.

Now, notice that in each of the lawsuits, it is fully acknowledged that the order signed by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin was done back in August. So, why are these lawsuits being filed right NOW, instead of back in August when the governor first issued the order… 90 days before the election?

… Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.

The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.

“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.

Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”

“With the support of our Attorney General, we will defend these commonsense steps, that we are legally required to take, with every resource available to us,” he added. “Virginia’s election will be secure and fair, and I will not stand idly by as this politically motivated action tries to interfere in our elections, period.”

Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (also now a candidate for governor in 2025) is also backing Youngkin’s position.

In 2006, then Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine signed into law a common sense bill requiring Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. It was the law then and it REMAINS the law now. https://t.co/TYURn5ZX94

— Winsome Earle-Sears (@winwithwinsome) October 11, 2024

The Executive Order was designed to both enforce the 2006 law, and also to establish HOW a noncitizen who had been registered to vote should be identified, and then removed off the voter roll, by insisting on real time DAILY updates from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and points out that Virginia, under the Youngkin administration, has worked to clean up the voter roll.

Recent improvements we have made include establishing comprehensive data-sharing agreements with seven states and receiving additional data from 42 states.

We conducted multiple National Change of Address mailings over the past two years and will continue to conduct them. This process identifies individuals who no longer reside in Virginia. The streamlined process for eliminating deceased coters includes accessing a national death record database and conducting a comprehensive audit. This resulted in us removing 79,867 deceased voters in 2023.

Virginia is one of only three states in the nations that require those registering to vote to provide their full 9-digit social security number for registration. Over ninety percent of voters in Virginia submit electronic registration applications online through the Department of Elections (ELECT), which requires a valid Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) credential, or submit registration applications when conducting transactions with DMV.

DMV requires applicants to submit proof of identity and legal presence for those that do not yet hold a vaild Virginia credential. When issuing a credential such as a driver’s license, DMV verfies applicants’ proof of identity and legal status with the Department Homeland Security Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database and the Social Security Administration database.

All data collected by the DMV that identifies non-citizens is shared with ELECT, which uses it to scrub existing voter rolls and remove non-citizens who may have purposefully or accidentally registered to vote. According to data from ELECT, between January 2022 and July 2024, records indicate we removed 6,303 non-citizens from the voter rolls.

Again, this all seems like a reasonable and straightforward way to ensure that only citizens vote in an election, even if this goes on during the “Quiet Period.” Presumably, anyone who was notified that their voter registration was canceled, and can prove that they are indeed an American citizen, can get this fixed right away. What is the DOJ trying to do here with this lawsuit? Are they looking to have any or all of the 6,303 voters who had been removed well before the 90 day cutoff restored? The activist groups were definitely out there looking for plaintiffs.

This is National School Boards Association re-run. We caught LWV-VA doing this. pic.twitter.com/UNQDEXRfVO

— Virginia Project (@ProjectVirginia) October 11, 2024

This smells like lawfare, egged on by activist groups, than an actual case seeking a reasonable remedy – especially when the two governors being targeted are Republicans. It’s not like the DOJ doesn’t have problems with selective prosecution right now or anything.

Voter integrity is absolutely essential to election security. Even the government’s own case states up front that noncitizens are not eligible to vote, but claims in the same section that “there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in the United States.” But that’s the thing. It doesn’t HAVE to be widespread – it just has to be ENOUGH. In a tight election, where we are told repeatedly that every vote counts, over six thousand people who are voting illegally could tip an election. And again – the activist groups and the DOJ could have sued back in August. But they didn’t. Why not?

Featured image: original Victory Girls art by Darleen Click