The DMV Doesn’t Detect a U.S. Citizen: Attorneys’ Advice to the Law Enforcement and Voter Registration Concerning an Incompetent State
Lawyers for state election officials denied in court filings that Virginians who left the citizenship box blank at the DMV were flagged to be removed from the voter rolls.
It is not known what citizenship status each of the 1,600 voters has. There is no way to check for U.S. citizens. Lawyers representing civil rights groups have been attempting to contact people on the list.
The attorney for Protect Democracy said that she has reached a number of citizens on the 1,600 voters list and that they may not have been citizens.
Several citizens who visited the DMV before receiving cancellation notices have spoken with her and her colleagues.
She likely failed to mark a box that she was a U.S. citizen, because afterwards, she received a letter from her county election office notifying her that information from the DMV indicated that she “may not be a U.S. citizen.” The notice asked her to affirm her citizenship, which she did, and then she mailed back the form.
In the summer, Virginia’s Department of Elections ran people who presented noncitizen documents through a federal database and flagged people who appeared not to be citizens, according to court filings.
As for Nadra Wilson, she arranged to take off early from work so that she could go to her county board of elections and straighten out her voter registration.
Over the course of the previous year, his office removed more than 200 people from the rolls. He said of the 43 people in that group who had previously voted, all of them had affirmed on earlier records that they were U.S. citizens, sometimes as many as “three, four or five times.”
Olsen said that if someone is flagged by the state as a possible noncitizen, county offices like his must send notices asking them to affirm their citizenship and then must automatically remove anyone from the rolls who doesn’t respond within 14 days.
The boxes at the top of the license application are for people to say whether or not they are citizens. It makes people make mistakes or not see the information.
Wilson got a notice of cancellation in the mail when she went to the Department of Motor Vehicle to renew her driver’s license. She said she was told that she was not a citizen and she didn’t think she did that.
Shaw thought it was “outrageous” that the state was removing voters so close to the election, and not giving them enough time to correct the mistake. “It’s insane, I can’t believe this has happened,” Shaw said.
Shaw said that she updated her voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles but found it to be poorly designed.
The Republican-led states have recently announced a number of new initiatives that have been accused of being too broad and have also affected eligible citizens.
“Illegal Voters” and “CHEAT” are not being put back on Virginia’s rolls by the Justice Department, as stated by Trump. There is no evidence for the claim.
Just six days before Election Day, the Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to continue its purge of more than 1,600 individuals from the state’s voter rolls.
The lower court’s ruling against Virginia was accepted by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. The state appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Voter Purge: A Case for a Systematic Determination of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Act of the United States
Wilson countered that Youngkin is “not correct” in how he has characterized the program given that it has also ensnared U.S. citizens like her. She said that the state program was very unfair.
Giles, who was nominated by President Biden, ordered Virginia to reinstate the 1,600 voters who were taken off by Wednesday. The state could still remove noncitizens through individualized review according to her order.
The 90 days leading up to an election are when states have to stop certain voter list maintenance programs that remove voters because they are too close to the election. This year, the quiet period began on Aug. 7th, the day Youngkin issued his executive order.
Virginia is asking the high court to weigh in after U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled Friday the state program violated federal law by systematically removing voters too close to a federal election.
Nadra Wilson of Lynchburg, Va., was concerned and confused when she received a letter in the mail from local election officials notifying her that her U.S. citizenship was in question.
The challengers alleged that Virginia’s voter purge did exactly what the federal law was aimed at preventing; it removed eligible voters who, as a result of the state’s action, did not know they were no longer eligible to vote.
The state contended that the lower courts “misinterpreted the NVRA.” Noncitizens can’t use the quiet period since they are ineligible to vote. Even if the “quiet period” did apply here, the state argued, the program was sufficiently individualized, not systematic.
The significance of court’s ruling is not how it affects the election in Virginia, where polls show the vice president ahead of Trump, but how it sends a signal. The signal that this sends is that if a majority of justices had an appetite for election appeals like this one, there will be more election appeals from more contentious states.