Virginia voter purge ensnares eligible US citizensExBulletin

Voters work on their ballots at a polling place in Arlington, Virginia, on September 20. AFP via Getty Images/AFP .

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Nadra Wilson, of Lynchburg, Virginia, was worried and confused when she received a letter in the mail from local election officials informing her that her U.S. citizenship was in question.

The notice said she must affirm that she is a U.S. citizen within 14 days or her voter registration would be canceled. It was first sent to an old address and then re-shipped. By the time Wilson received it in October, the deadline had passed.

But Wilson was intrigued by the letter. “I was born in Brooklyn, New York, I'm a citizen,” Wilson said in an interview with NPR before showing her U.S. passport as proof.

Wilson, who works in the health care industry, moved to Virginia nine years ago and first registered there before the 2016 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court could rule as early as Tuesday afternoon on an emergency request to block a lower court ruling ordering the state to reinstate Wilson and some 1,600 other registered voters of Virginia. According to the lower court, a voter suppression scheme purged them from the state's registration list, in violation of federal law. The state's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, said the program enforced a 2006 state law and excluded noncitizens who were not eligible to vote. He issued an executive order in August requiring county election officials to expel suspected noncitizens reported by the state on a daily basis.

But as the stories of Wilson and other voters show, the program also wrongly ensnared American citizens who have the right to vote.

An emergency request to the US Supreme Court

Civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice sued Virginia over the program earlier this month.

Virginia is asking the high court to rule after U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled Friday that the state's program violated federal law by systematically eliminating voters too close to a federal election.

Under the National Voter Registration Act, during the 90 days before an election, states must suspend certain types of voter roll maintenance programs that systematically exclude voters to ensure that errors are not made too close to the election. The so-called period of calm began this year on August 7, the same day Youngkin issued his decree.

Giles, who was appointed by President Biden, ordered Virginia to reinstate the 1,600 voters removed on Wednesday. His order also clarified that the state could still deport noncitizens “through individualized review.”

Youngkin blasted the decision.

“This is a stunning decision by a federal judge ordering Virginia to reinstate individuals who identified as non-citizens into the voting rolls,” he told Fox News on Friday.

Wilson countered that Youngkin is “not right” in how he characterized the program given that it also ensnared American citizens like her. She called the public program “very, very unfair.”

Over the weekend, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court's ruling against Virginia. The state then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Because Virginia allows in-person voter registration until Election Day, eligible voters still have time to register and vote in the election, regardless of the Supreme Court's decision.

Still, some Virginia voters who were mistakenly removed may have missed the opportunity to request an absentee ballot.

The Virginia litigation comes during a campaign season in which former President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have repeated baseless conspiracy theories that noncitizens are poised to vote in large numbers in this election . Critics say it is an attempt to sow distrust in the elections and lay the groundwork for possible electoral challenges. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal and state elections. A limited number of localities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, such as those for school boards.

Trump misinterpreted the Justice Department's lawsuit by claiming the agency aims to put “illegal voters” back on Virginia's rolls and “CHEA” in the upcoming election. There is no evidence for this claim.

Virginia is among several Republican-led states that have announced controversial new initiatives in recent months aimed at deporting potential noncitizens, but which critics say were too broad and also affected eligible citizens.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alabama halted that state's program to deactivate the records of 3,251 people the state suspected of being noncitizens. The secretary of state's office has so far acknowledged that at least 2,074 of those people were eligible voters, according to court documents. Trump's judge nominee said during an Oct. 16 hearing that the state “identified a handful, at least four, perhaps as many as ten, perhaps more, of non-citizens who were listed as one way or another on the Alabama voter rolls.”

DMV Errors

Another Virginia voter, Rina Shaw, 22, who said she was born in the state, didn't realize her voter registration had been canceled until NPR asked her about her status registration and checks it online.

Shaw, who started voting in 2020, said she recently updated her voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles while getting her learner's permit and found the “poorly designed” form.

She probably didn't check a box saying she was a U.S. citizen, because afterward she received a letter from her county elections office informing her that DMV information indicated she “may not be American citizen. The notice asked her to affirm her citizenship, which she did, and then she mailed the form back.

Shaw acknowledged that she probably missed the 14-day deadline to respond, although she did not expect her registration to be canceled.

According to a spreadsheet of deregistered voters that was filed in court and obtained by NPR, it appears Shaw's registration was canceled on Oct. 20.

Shaw called it “outrageous” that the state kicked out voters like her “so close to the election” and gave voters so little time to correct their mistake. “It’s insane, I can’t believe this happened,” Shaw said.

Wilson had also gone to the DMV to renew her driver's license shortly before receiving her cancellation notice in the mail. She said she was later told she had to check a box saying she wasn't a citizen, but she told NPR, “I don't believe I did that.”

Eric Olsen, Prince William County's elections director, is familiar with stories of DMV visits that led to Virginia voters being mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens.

The DMV driver's license application has boxes at the very top, above the title, allowing people to indicate whether or not they are a citizen. Olsen said “it just makes people want to make mistakes or not see the information.”

Olsen said if someone is flagged by the state as a possible non-citizen, county offices like his must send notices asking them to affirm their citizenship and must then automatically remove from the lists anyone who does not does not respond within 14 days.

In May, Olsen reviewed the records of the 162 people his office had delisted over the previous year under the program. He added that of the 43 people in that group who had already voted, all had claimed in previous records that they were U.S. citizens, sometimes as many as “three, four or five times.”

In those cases, Olsen said, “we would assume that it's more than likely that they simply missed that box on the form.”

Lawyers for state elections officials denied in court filings that Virginians who left the citizenship box blank at the DMV had been flagged as being removed from the voter rolls.

Only voters who were removed after August 7 are subject to the district court's order requiring them to be re-registered.

It is not yet clear what the citizenship status of all 1,600 voters is. There is no database of US citizens to check against. Lawyers representing civil rights groups in the lawsuit have attempted to contact everyone on the list.

Anna Dorman, an attorney for the voting rights nonprofit Protect Democracy, said she contacted “many” citizens on the 1,600-voter list and said there were signs “Many of these people are citizens who were illegally purged under this law.” program.”

Dorman and his colleagues spoke with other U.S. citizens who visited the DMV just before receiving cancellation notices from election officials.

Carolina Diaz Tavera, a naturalized U.S. citizen whose voter registration was canceled but who did not appear on the list of removed voters after Aug. 7, filed a statement in the lawsuit saying she feared that the State has removed her from the electoral rolls due to obsolete electoral rolls. DMV has since recorded that she was a legal resident when she obtained her driver's license.

The Virginia Department of Elections worked with the DMV over the summer to run people who had previously submitted non-citizen documents through a federal database, SAVE, and flagged people who did not appear be citizens, according to court filings.

Dorman said most of the people she was able to reach didn't know they had been removed from the voter rolls. “Either they never received the government flyer or they received it and they thought it was a scam,” Dorman said.

As for Nadra Wilson, she arranged to leave work early so she could go to her county board of elections and get her voter registration in order.

“I’m grateful I was able to fix it,” Wilson said.

Wilson decided to vote early and was able to vote Tuesday during his lunch break.

NPR's Audrey Nguyen contributed reporting to this story.

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