A federal judge on Friday granted a Justice Department request to block Virginia from systematically removing alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls just before the election.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ordered the state to immediately halt its program and restore within five days the voter registrations of more than 1,600 people deleted in recent months.
The decision comes 10 days before Election Day and about a month after early voting started in the state.
Virginia’s program “has curtailed the right of eligible voters to cast their ballots in the same manner as other eligible voters,” Giles said as she announced her ruling.
Ryan Snow, an attorney with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which represented civil rights groups that sued Virginia, called the ruling “a major victory.”
“All eligible voters who were wrongly removed from the voter rolls can now cast their ballots,” Snow said. “No one should tamper with a citizen’s right to vote.”
Lawyers who obtained the full list of people to be removed from the voter rolls said 18 U.S. citizens had been wrongly removed, a lawyer for the civil rights groups said in court Thursday. The Justice Department said in an earlier filing that 43 people delisted in Prince William County were likely U.S. citizens.
“How many more are there?” Giles asked rhetorically on Friday.
Governor Glenn Youngkin remained defiant in a statement responding to the judge’s ruling, saying: “Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency suspension of the command.”
Later that day, Virginia filed an appeal.
Former President Donald Trump blasted the ruling on Friday, calling Giles a “radical judge” while praising Youngkin for opposing the ruling.
“This outrageous decision goes against the foundation of our democracy,” Trump said during his speech in Austin, Texas.
Youngkin, a Republican, signed an executive order in August that mandated the purge of voter rolls of alleged noncitizens. Under the program, people are flagged for removal if they check a box on a Department of Motor Vehicles form indicating they are not citizens, or if they leave that section blank.
The groups that filed the lawsuit say the program catches people who obtained a driver’s license as a green card holder and later became citizens, as well as others who simply filled out the form incorrectly.
Under the National Voter Registration Act, states are prohibited from systematically removing people from the voter rolls within 90 days of an election. A Justice Department attorney said in court Thursday that Virginia’s program could be legal any other time of the year, but not during this “quiet period” before the election.
A Virginia attorney, Charles Cooper, defended the program in court Thursday, arguing, “Hundreds of noncitizens will appear on these rolls again. … Every time a noncitizen votes, a legal vote is nullified.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
