The U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency stay, blocking a lower court order requiring Virginia to add aliens back to the voter rolls after the state’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, had ordered them removed.
“The application for stay presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is granted,” the Supreme Court wrote in an order Wednesday.
The case, Susan Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, pits Beals, the commissioner for the Virginia Department of Elections, against left-leaning activist groups, including the League of Women Voters Virginia and African Communities Together. The U.S. Justice Department joined the case on the side of the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights.
The nation’s highest court blocked an Oct. 25 order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which required Virginia to add back to the rolls aliens that the commonwealth had removed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4rth Circuit had allowed the Oct. 25 order to stand while it considers the case.
The Supreme Court justices appointed by former President Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—would have denied the application for a stay.
The Supreme Court’s stay will last until the 4th Circuit determines the case. If the 4th Circuit rules against Virginia and Virginia appeals to the Supreme Court, the stay will last until the Supreme Court either rejects the appeal or resolves the case.
The Justice Department sued Virginia after it removed the names of 6,303 aliens and Alabama after it moved 3,251 aliens to an “inactive” list.
The Justice Department claims that Virginia and Alabama violated the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day preelection deadline for “systematic” list maintenance programs. The Justice Department claims that this deadline prevents all “systematic” removals from a voter registration list within 90 days of an election.
Yet critics, like The Heritage Foundation’s senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky, note that many federal statutes forbid aliens from claiming to be a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote, which is a felony. According to von Spakovsky, the Justice Department “has a duty to enforce these statutes, something the agency apparently has no interest in doing under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris” (emphasis original).
“This is a significant victory for election integrity,” von Spakovsky said in a statement on the ruling. “The Department of Justice filed this lawsuit against Virginia that misinterprets a provision of the National Voter Registration Act.”
The Heritage legal expert noted that the 90-day pre-election deadline “doesn’t apply to non-citizens who never should have been eligible to register in the first place and are violating federal criminal law by registering to vote.”
“States should take this action from the Supreme Court as confirmation that they can clean up their voter rolls,” he added. “It should also signal to DOJ that they need to investigate and prosecute these aliens, not try to force Virginia or any other state to keep them registered in voter rolls in violation of federal law.”
Former President Donald Trump seems unlikely to prevail against Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the Old Dominion. Biden won Virginia by 10% in 2020, and Harris still enjoys a 5.8% lead over Trump in the RealClearPolitics polling average. However, the race has tightened in recent days, with some polls showing Harris’ lead shrinking to 2%.
While Virginia still has a large rural community, it is also home to a large number of federal bureaucrats who live outside the Washington, D.C., area.