Federal judge orders Virginia to stop its voter purge of legal citizens, restore registrations

“We want our voters back on the rolls,” U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said. “We don’t want confusion.”

A federal judge in Alexandria ruled today that Virginia must stop its voter purge program and restore the voter registrations of about 1,600 people who had their right to vote canceled. 

“We’ve already started to find citizens, both natural born and naturalized, on these lists,” said Brent Ferguson of the Campaign Legal Center outside the federal courthouse today. “So what this program was doing was taking eligible citizens off the rolls, and what this win means today is that they’re back on.”

U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles said that Virginia had clearly carried out a systematic program to remove voters from the rolls as directed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin with an executive order in August. Giles said there was no evidence that noncitizens were being removed, as lawyers for Virginia had tried to argue. 

Giles took issue with the fact that Virginia was removing voters from the rolls based on paperwork they had once filled out with the Department of Motor Vehicles saying they were non-citizens. 

The judge said that people can make mistakes when filling out paperwork and people’s citizenship status can change. Therefore, more review is needed on an individualized basis than what Virginia was carrying out with its program. 

“We want our voters back on the rolls,” Giles said. “We don’t want confusion.” 

Even as she directed Virginia to restore the voting rights of people who had their registration’s canceled, Giles acknowledged it might not be possible to undo the harm already done given Election Day is less than two weeks away. 

“The broader message is that when states across the country come out with press releases or orders saying that they’ve found thousands of non-citizens on the rolls, those are always shown to be inaccurate,” Ferguson of the Campaign Legal Center said.