Virginia asks SCOTUS to overrule Biden judge’s reinstatement of suspected noncitizens to voter rolls
The Commonwealth of Virginia has played what might be its last card against the Biden-Harris Department of Justice, betting the U.S. Supreme Court might allow election officials to resume taking noncitizens off the state’s voter rolls.
Like other red states, Virginia has worked diligently to remove foreign nationals from its voter rolls in an effort to ensure that only American citizens are casting ballots in this election. These efforts, ramped up by Gov. Glenn Youngkin via
executive order on Aug. 7, drew the ire of the DOJ, which sued earlier this month to foil the election integrity initiative — just as it had sued Alabama weeks earlier.
A Biden-nominated district judge obliged the DOJ Friday,
ruling that Virginia — where the latest Quantus Insights poll shows Kamala Harris leading President Donald Trump by only one percentage point — must restore the voter registrations of thousands of individuals who allegedly identified as foreign nationals.
Virginia asked the 4th Circuit to put a hold on Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles’ order, but a pair of Obama-appointed judges and another Biden appointee denied the request Sunday.
‘About 1,000 presented noncitizen residency documents to DMV and were then positively identified as noncitizens.’
Left with one more option, Republican state officials turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, filing late Sunday night for an emergency stay of Giles’ injunction, which is scheduled to go into effect on Wednesday.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares
stated upon filing, “Americans citizens — and no one else — should determine American elections.”
Youngkin
responded, “It’s commonsense: noncitizens shouldn’t be on our voter rolls.”
According to the commonwealth’s emergency application, the injunction sought by the Biden-Harris DOJ will “irreparably injure Virginia’s sovereignty, confuse her voters, overload her election machinery and administrators, and likely lead noncitizens to think they are permitted to vote, a criminal offense that will cancel the franchise of eligible voters.”
Blaze News previously reported that Giles claimed the removals were a “clear violation” of the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period provision, which requires states to complete programs intended to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from registration lists by no later than 90 days prior to a primary election or general election for federal office.
Virginia’s emergency application stressed that contrary to Giles’ understanding and the DOJ’s claim, the commonwealth’s process is not systematic — which would run afoul of the NVRA — but is instead individualized. Moreover, the state indicated the lesser court’s injunction was based on a provision of the NVRA that “does not even apply to the removal of noncitizens and other voter registrations that are void ab initio.”
The state told the high court that of the over 1,600 suspected noncitizens whom the Biden judge ordered back onto the voter rolls, “About 600 of these individuals personally informed Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) that they are not citizens, and about 1,000 presented noncitizen residency documents to DMV and were then positively identified as noncitizens through the United States’ own Systematic Alerian Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database.”
Chief Justice John Roberts requested that the opponents of Virginia’s election integrity initiative respond to the state’s emergency appeal by Tuesday afternoon, CNN indicated, a signal that the high court will act swiftly.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, recently
told the Daily Caller that the Biden-Harris DOJ’s lawsuits against Virginia and Alabama are the “exact opposite of what DOJ should be doing, it is a criminal violation … — in fact, it’s a felony for an alien to register to vote.”
“And so what the DOJ ought to be doing is going to Virginia and saying, ‘Can you please give me the files of each of these voters so we can investigate and potentially prosecute them?’ And no, instead, they’re saying, ‘No, you have to keep on the voter rolls aliens who are breaking federal law,'” continued von Spakovsky.
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