The U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling on Wednesday allowing the state of Virginia to continue removing non-citizens from voting rolls.<\/p>\n
The 6-3 decision reversed a lower federal court that ordered state officials to not only pause the removal but to also reinstate names that had been removed despite the fact that they are declared non-citizens.<\/p>\n
It is against federal law for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.<\/p>\n
The decision is a victory for Gov. Glenn Youngkin and comes just days after Virginia filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to halt a lower court ruling that ordered the restoration of approximately 1,600 individuals\u2019 names to its voter rolls, Fox News reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n At the center of the case is the question of whether Virginia\u2019s voter removal process infringes on a so-called quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), a federal law that mandates states to suspend all \u201csystematic\u201d voter roll maintenance for 90 days ahead of a federal election.<\/p>\n That argument placed the Department of Justice\u2014 which sued the state over its removal program earlier this month\u2014against Youngkin, who maintained that the state\u2019s process is \u201cindividualized\u201d and complies with both state and federal law.<\/p>\n Justice Department officials also expressed concerns in their lawsuit that eligible voters may have been improperly removed from the rolls without sufficient notice or adequate time to rectify the error.<\/p>\n In Virginia\u2019s petition to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Jason S. Miyares contested the lawsuit and subsequent court ruling on several grounds. He argued that the NVRA does not apply to \u201cself-identified noncitizens\u201d in the state, adopting a narrower interpretation of the law than the Justice Department, which he contended could undermine the primary basis for the lawsuit.<\/p>\n Secondly, he contended that if the NVRA does apply, the state still has an \u201cindividualized process\u201d for removing voters, which is carried out by the Department of Motor Vehicles and local registration offices.<\/p>\n Late Monday, attorneys general from all 26 Republican-led states joined Virginia in filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, supporting its claim that the removal program was conducted on an \u201cindividualized\u201d basis. They further argued that the Justice Department\u2019s interpretation of the protections granted under the NVRA is overly broad and does not extend to noncitizens.<\/p>\n Attorneys\u00a0urged the court to grant\u00a0Virginia\u2019s emergency motion and \u201crestore the status quo,\u201d noting that doing so \u201cwould comply with the law and enable Virginia to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming election.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis Court should reject Respondents\u2019 effort to change the rules in the middle of the game and restore the status quo ante,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThe\u00a0Constitution leaves decisions\u00a0about voter qualifications to the people of Virginia. And the people of Virginia have decided that noncitizens are not permitted to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, a Biden appointee, on Friday ordered the state to restore the registration of more than 1600 people whom it had taken off the rolls, per the SCOTUS Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n The blog noted further:<\/p>\n Giles barred the state from \u201ccontinuing any systematic program intended to remove the names of ineligible voters from registration lists less than 90 days before the November 5, 2024, federal General Election,\u201d although she left open the possibility that the state could still remove some voters on a case-by-case basis \u2013 for example, those with criminal convictions and those who have died. She also ordered the state to restore the registration of voters whom it had removed from the rolls as part of the program.<\/em><\/p>\n The state went to the 4th Circuit, asking it to put Giles\u2019 order on hold. But a three-judge panel made up of two Obama appointees and one Biden appointee denied (as relevant here) that request on Sunday, writing that it was \u201cunpersuaded\u201d that Virginia\u2019s program complied with the NVRA.<\/em><\/p>\n The post Supreme Court Rules Virginia Can Continue Removing Non-Citizens From Voting Rolls<\/a> appeared first on Conservative Brief<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling on Wednesday allowing the state of Virginia to continue removing non-citizens from voting rolls. The 6-3 decision reversed a lower federal court that ordered state officials to not only pause the removal but to also reinstate names that had been removed despite the fact that they are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/topproductsonly.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}