A federal judge in Alexandria will hear a challenge today to Virginia’s effort to remove people from the voter rolls in advance of the election.
The days and weeks before an election are supposed to be quiet time, when state election officials are prohibited from purging the voter rolls. That's why some voting advocates are concerned about an executive order from Governor Glenn Youngkin that calls for daily purges of people flagged by the Department of Motor Vehicles as potentially non-citizens.
"Executive order 35 is part of a very dangerous trend across the country of politicians implying or even explicitly stating that ineligible voters are participating in our elections," says Anna Dorman, counsel at Protect Democracy. "This is not true. There is no evidence to support these lies."
The governor says he is following the same state law as previous governors, which calls for the DMV to flag potential non-citizens. He's just doing it daily instead of monthly. Ryan Snow at the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law says that opens the door to paperwork errors and honest mistakes disenfranchising legitimate voters.
“If this information were transmitted from DMV on a monthly basis, there may be some safeguards in place on the DMV side, at least, that would be able to catch that as an error," says Snow.
The Department of Justice acknowledges that sometimes voters can be kicked off the rolls during the 90-day quiet period – if they commit a felony, for example. The question for the federal judge is whether the DMV reports should be a noise piercing the quiet.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
