Biden administration sues Virginia over voter purge program

CNN
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The Biden administration sued election officials in Virginia on Friday, claiming they violated federal law by screening out voters marked as potential noncitizens during the so-called quiet period before an election.

The lawsuit follows a similar Justice Department challenge to an attempt by Alabama officials to have voters removed from the voter rolls. Republicans have made the alleged danger of non-citizens voting a central focus of the 2024 campaign, even though cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare.

In court papers filed Friday, the Justice Department said Virginia’s purge program, formalized in an executive order by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in August, violates the National Voter Registration Act’s requirement that any mass voter removal program be completed no later than 90 days before the election must be completed.

Youngkin’s executive order was put into effect exactly 90 days before the election, but the Justice Department points to signs that deportations under the order have been underway since then.

The executive order directed local election officials to remove from office any voters who indicated on DMV forms that they were not citizens. These voters will be sent letters giving them 14 days to confirm their citizenship or have their registrations canceled.

Previous iterations of the program resulted in likely citizens being removed from the rolls, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit, pointing to recent comments from a county election official who said it had looked at dozens of voters who had been purged according to the program’s protocols and it was found that many of them had repeatedly confirmed their citizenship, some with social security numbers.

The lawsuit says that under the program, local election officials have no discretion to prevent the cancellation of voters who do not return election notifications, even if the officials have reason to believe those voters are U.S. voters -Citizen acts.

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, Youngkin accused the Biden administration of “filing an unprecedented lawsuit” less than 30 days before the election.

“Virginians – and Americans – will see this for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of elections in the Commonwealth, the true crucible of American democracy,” Youngkin said, pledging to defend the policy.