A federal judge on Friday granted a judicial request to prevent Virginia from formally removing non-citizens from voter rolls near the election.
U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ordered the agency to immediately halt its program and restore the voter registrations of more than 1,600 people that had been deleted in recent months within five days.
The decision was taken 10 days before the election day and a month after early voting began in the state.
Giles announced his ruling that Virginia’s plan “reduced the right of eligible voters to cast their ballots in the same way as other eligible voters.”
Ryan Snow, an attorney with the Lawyers Group for Civil Rights Under the Act, who represents civil rights groups suing Virginia, called the ruling “a huge victory.”
“All eligible voters who were wrongly removed from the voter rolls can now vote,” Snow said. “No one shall interfere with the right of a citizen to vote.”
Attorneys who have obtained the full list of those removed from voter rolls say 18 U.S. citizens were wrongly removed, a lawyer for civil rights groups told a court on Thursday. The Justice Department said in an earlier filing that 43 people removed from Prince William County may be U.S. citizens.
“How many more are there?” Giles asked rhetorically on Friday.
Governor Glenn Youngin said in a statement reacting to the judge’s ruling that “Virginia will immediately seek an emergency stay of the injunction in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the US Supreme Court.”
Later in the day, Virginia filed its appeal.
Former President Donald Trump blasted the ruling Friday, calling Giles an “extreme judge” while praising Young for opposing the ruling.
“This outrageous decision goes against the very foundation of our democracy,” Trump said during comments in Austin, Texas.
Youngin, a Republican, signed an executive order in August that mandated voter registration for purported noncitizens. Under the scheme, people will be removed if they check a box on the Department of Motor Vehicles form indicating they are not a citizen or leave that section blank.
The groups suing say the program catches people who obtained driver’s licenses as green card holders and later became citizens, as well as others who filled out the form incorrectly.
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from formally removing people from the electoral roll within 90 days of an election. A lawyer for the Justice Department told the court Thursday that Virginia’s plan could be legal at any other time of the year, but not during this “quiet period” before an election.
Virginia’s attorney general, Charles Cooper, defended the plan in court Thursday, saying, “Hundreds of non-citizens are going to be on this list. … Every time a non-citizen votes, it nullifies the legal vote.
