The Supreme Court’s conservative justices handed Republicans a temporary victory Wednesday, allowing Virginia to purge about 1,600 voter registrations just days before the presidential election.
According to The New York Times, the court’s ruling aims to prevent people who are not U.S. citizens from voting, a move that state Republican officials and former President Donald Trump support after claiming that it is a concern.
The case was place on the court’s emergency docket. According to the order, there was no vote count, which is common for emergency docket cases, per the Times. However, it noted that three liberal Justices — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — would have denied the request for the state to continue voter purge.
After lower courts previously ruled that federal law could not remove registered voters from the rolls when it’s so close to the election, Virginia appealed the decision, per the Times.
Several voting rights groups, including Campaign Legal Center, denounced the court’s ruling, stating on its website that it would “wrongfully remove qualified voters from the voting rolls less than one week before the 2024 presidential election.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, described the decision as “a victory for commonsense and election fairness,” according to the Times. However, in his effort to crack down on non-U.S. citizens voting, some registered voters were mistakenly removed from the rolls.
The Associated Press reported that the state governor commented that those who were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls can still vote due to Virginia’s same-day registration law.
“And so there is the ultimate, ultimate safeguard in Virginia, no one is being precluded from voting, and therefore, I encourage every single citizen go vote,” Youngkin told reporters, per The Associated Press.
Rina Shaw, 22, of Chesterfield, Virginia, was born and raised in Virginia and was one of the people who were removed from the voter rolls.
“My first reaction was that that was just ridiculous and it shouldn’t have been allowed in October, of all months. It should have been something that happened six months before the election rather than right on the eve of it,” Shaw said, according to The Associated Press.
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