CNN
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Virginia Republican Party Officials That’s what the US Supreme Court asked on Monday One of the first major voting cases to hit the high court ahead of next week’s presidential election is to allow the state to implement a program to remove suspected non-citizens from voter rolls.
The appeal has political significance, as former President Donald Trump and other Republicans seized on the case as part of a widespread popular vote in the country.
It’s one of those election-related cases that comes amid an incredibly close race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and polls showing widespread distrust of the Supreme Court.
With millions of Americans voting early, the election is already underway, prompting a flood of lawsuits. But a new one CNN poll powered by SSRS 56% of registered voters said they had some or no confidence in the Supreme Court making the right decisions in any legal cases related to competition.
There is a significant political divide in that number, with Trump supporters more than twice as likely as Harris supporters to express at least moderate confidence in the court.
Because the Virginia case involved a relatively small number of voters and the state has reliably supported Democratic presidential candidates in the past several elections, the decision is unlikely to have an impact on the race. But Trump has already touted the case several times on social media, at one point describing a lower court ruling against the plan as “election interference.”
Virginia officials asked the high court to act by Tuesday. Chief Justice John Roberts asked parties opposing the plan to respond to the urgent appeal by Tuesday afternoon, signaling the court would deal with the matter urgently.
A lower court ruling blocking the plan, Virginia officials told the justices, would “irreparably injure the sovereignty of Virginia, confuse her voters, overburden her election machinery and administrators, and make it a criminal offense to allow non-citizens to vote. Suffrage of Eligible Voters.”
In August, an order signed by Virginia Gov. Glenn Young, a Republican, required election officials to take more aggressive steps to match residents who self-identified as noncitizens to voter rolls at the Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies. To clear the matches. State officials contend that about 1,600 people removed from voter rolls under the program said they were not citizens.
But the Biden administration and voting rights groups sued, and a U.S. district court ruled last week that at least some eligible U.S. citizens had their records — and therefore, their right to vote — attacked under the plan. U.S. District Judge Patricia Toliver Giles said none of the parties involved in the case knew for certain the citizenship status of the purged voters because the information was not verified.
“Neither the court nor the parties, on either side, as we sit in this courtroom, have said on Friday that the people removed from this court are actually non-citizens,” Giles, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, said Friday.
A three-judge panel of the district court and the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals — all appointed by Democratic leaders — soon blocked the Virginia plan from implementation.
The legal battle centers on the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which bars states from making “systematic” changes to voting rolls for 90 days after a federal election. The Biden administration and caucuses said Young’s order created exactly the kind of formal program that would take place within a so-called “quiet period” mandated by federal law.
Despite Trump’s protests, none of the court orders prevent the government from conducting eligibility assessments on individual residents.
Trump and other Republicans are firm on illegal voting claims; This was part of their argument to explain the former president’s loss in 2020. However, documented cases of non-citizens voting are extremely rare; A recent Georgia audit of the 8.2 million people on its rolls found 20 registered noncitizens — only nine of whom voted.
In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia election officials relied in part on a dark legal doctrine that warns federal courts to avoid last-minute changes to the state of voting rules before an election. The so-called “Purcell Principle” is a 2006 Supreme Court Judgment, It is intended to prevent federal courts from being drawn into last-minute election disputes.
But that principle has hitherto been widely understood to apply to challenges involving state laws; Not executive orders. In this case, there is a federal law imposing a quiet period.
This story has been updated with additional details.
