Supreme Court halts order for Virginia to restore voter registrations

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court won’t require Virginia to restore 1,600 names the commonwealth removed from its voting rolls in advance of next week’s election, stopping lower-court rulings that found Virginia had violated federal law by removing voter registrations within 90 days of the election.

The 6-3 order Wednesday from the court did not explain the reasoning for reversing lower-court rulings so close to the election. Virginia officials had argued that they had simply followed commonwealth law to remove noncitizens from the registration rolls.

However, the lower court found that Virginia’s process hadn’t actually checked whether each voter was actually a noncitizen and that the purge of supposed noncitizens actually removed the registrations of eligible voters.

The trial court found that Virginia likely violated a provision of the National Voter Registration Act which requires that states not remove registrations in the 90 days prior to an election.

The Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees voted together, and its three Democratic appointees would have kept the lower-court order in place.

Former President Donald Trump, the current Republican nominee for president, has sought to highlight the immigration and voting issue as a theme for the election. Without evidence, he has stoked on social media and in a presidential debate the idea that Democrats were looking to add noncitizens to voting registration lists.

Some congressional Republicans pressed this fall for Congress to pass legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and require states to remove noncitizens from their official lists of eligible voters.

Wednesday’s order reverses decisions by a federal trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit that did not pause the lower-court ruling and meant Virginia had to restore those registrations ahead of the election.