The governor of Virginia and his attorney general are not going to take the latest ruling from a federal judge lying down, not with Election Day a mere eight days away.

As we have covered on this blog, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice decided to sue Virginia for *checks notes* enforcing a 2006 law that states that noncitizens who end up registered to vote must be removed from the voter rolls. The DOJ’s argument? They claim that Virginia can only remove voters up to 90 days before an election, so if noncitizens just HAPPEN to end up voting, oh well! Even though the DOJ acknowledges at the beginning of its lawsuit that it is illegal for anyone who isn’t a citizen of the United States to vote, they still don’t want those voters removed.

The voters in question are some 1,500 people who have SELF-IDENTIFIED as noncitizens, but ended up on the voter rolls anyway. And the federal government under Joe Biden is claiming it is just TOO HARD AND MESSY to make sure that only citizens vote in an election.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, an appointee of President Joe Biden, sided with the Justice Department and those groups. As expected after a court hearing earlier in the week, she ordered the state to stop the program and restore the voter registration of anyone whose registration was canceled as part of the program after Aug. 7.

Her order does not prevent the state from removing names from the rolls based on “individual correction,” but targets the sweeping nature of the program.

Youngkin immediately filed an appeal to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. “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,” he said in a statement.

Well, the Fourth Circuit ruled on Sunday that nope, they were siding with Judge Giles, and Virginia was not allowed to remove those noncitizens off the voter rolls.

In an unusual Sunday ruling, a unanimous panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals largely rebuffed arguments from lawyers for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that an injunction the Justice Department and civil rights groups obtained against the program from a lower-court judge Friday was legally flawed and would be too disruptive to administer in the just over a week remaining before Election Day.

Youngkin’s attorneys argued that a ban in federal law on systematic programs to remove voters in the 90 days before a federal election does not apply to efforts aimed at removing non-citizens, but the appeals court forcefully rejected that as an “argument that violates basic principles of statutory construction.”

The three-judge panel’s order stressed that Virginia officials “remain able to prevent noncitizens from voting by canceling registrations on an individualized basis or prosecuting any noncitizen who votes,” but said a system Virginia uses to match citizenship data from the Department of Motor Vehicles with voter rolls appears to violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 when implemented during the so-called “quiet period” before elections.

About 1,600 people were removed from Virginia voter rolls in the wake of an Aug. 7 executive order from Youngkin, according to court filings. It’s unclear how many were non-citizens, but at least some were citizens. Some may have re-registered. While non-citizens often make it onto voting rolls, it is illegal for them to cast ballots, and instances of them actually voting are extremely rare.

Ah, I see we’re doing the “it never happens” bit, before moving into the typical “well, it happened, and it’s a good thing that it happens” stage. If it is illegal for a noncitizen to vote, and casting a ballot is “extremely rare,” then WHY is it a problem to remove them off the voter roll if they have SELF-IDENTIFIED as not being a citizen of the United States? This is extremely suspect, and does anyone else smell some election interference here?

Which is why Attorney General Jason Miyares announced that Virginia would be appealing this decision to the Supreme Court now, instead of asking for an en banc review of the decision by the Fourth Circuit. Either noncitizen voting is illegal, or it’s not – and apparently, these Fourth Circuit judges simply have no interest in what the law actually says.

A panel of 2 Obama-appointed judges and 1 Biden-appointed judge has sided with the Obama-Biden DOJ in opposing Virginia’s effort to bar aliens from voting in the election — notwithstanding that it is a federal crime for aliens to vote. https://t.co/34Ja4KOIwb

— Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) October 28, 2024

Governor Youngkin applauded Attorney General Miyares’s filing on Sunday evening.

It’s commonsense: noncitizens shouldn’t be on our voter rolls. Thank you @JasonMiyaresVA for filing immediately with the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency appeal of the order for Virginia to put over 1,500 people who self-identified as non-citizens back on the voter rolls. https://t.co/rY4ymZduqq

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) October 27, 2024

The Supreme Court is in session, but will they be willing to accept this case and rule on it before November 5th? Of course, creating this time crunch was always the point. The DOJ triggered this lawsuit against Virginia with less than a month to go before the election, knowing that every single day this case spends in court is another day ticked off before the election. Isn’t the federal government supposed to be invested in voter integrity, and not letting citizens of other countries vote in American elections?

We have seen voter registration shenanigans popping up in places like Pennsylvania, but that is to be expected, as Pennsylvania is a swing state. Why all this focus on Virginia? Is this simply to mess with the Youngkin administration? Or… does the Biden administration sincerely think that Virginia could be in play for Donald Trump during this election? Real Clear Politics has Kamala Harris leading by 6 points in Virginia, which fits in with the previous two election cycles. Biden won the state by over 9 points, and Hillary Clinton won the state in 2016 by over 5 points – but she had Tim Kaine, a former governor and current senator from Virginia, as her running mate in that election. It would be wild to assume that Virginia could actually be tight enough that the Biden-Harris DOJ would be willing to go to the mattresses over 1500 noncitizen voters… wouldn’t it?

Now we get to wait and see what the Supreme Court will decide to do. I have a feeling we won’t have to wait very long to know if they will take the case or not.

Featured image via MarkThomas on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license