by Natalia Mittelstadt
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice is suing states and towns across the country in an effort to thwart election integrity measures ahead of the presidential election, resulting in pushback from election integrity advocates.
The DOJ has sued Virginia, Alabama, and rural Wisconsin towns over the removal of non-citizens from voter rolls and switching to only paper ballots and hand-counting. Some of the jurisdictions are fighting back, arguing that they are following the law as they work to ensure election integrity.
The Justice Department sued Virginia earlier this month over removing non-citizens from its rolls ahead of the Nov. 5 elections. A federal judge in Virginia on Friday ordered the commonwealth to place non-citizens back on its voter rolls. The judge ruled that removing the registered voters from the rolls violated federal law, WRIC reported.
The suit was against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Virginia State Board of Elections, and the Virginia Commissioner of Elections for allegedly violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The NVRA prevents states from using systematic programs to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls within 90 days of a federal election, according to the DOJ.
While Virginia argued that the non-citizens removed from the voter rolls are ineligible to vote, the judge ruled that they were illegally removed too close to the election.
“Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals – who self-identified themselves as noncitizens – back onto the voter rolls,” Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in a statement. “Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.”
“This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-Governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal–and the ultimate failsafe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens to cast a provisional ballot,” Youngkin continued. “This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.
“Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency stay of the injunction,” he added.
Following the court ruling, Cleta Mitchell told Just the News on Friday that the judge’s decision was incorrect.
“The federal judge is one of the Biden appointees, so we are not surprised by the ruling. It is erroneous and must be appealed,” Mitchell said.
“I fervently hope that the [Virginia] AG files an emergency petition to the US Supreme Court, bypassing the very left wing 4th Circuit and getting this resolved asap, not just for Virginia but for ALL the states, since the DOJ send a letter to every state election official telling them the states cannot remove anyone from the voter rolls, including noncitizens, people whose registrations are invalid under state law and are void from the beginning. So every state needs SCOTUS to weigh in and reverse this order handed down today in Virginia,” she continued.
She added that the Biden administration is clearly targeting jurisdictions that are attempting to implement election integrity measures. “[T]he Biden-Harris DOJ is definitely going after states and municipalities who are trying to secure their elections and make sure that elections are not polluted or manipulated by illegal votes,” Mitchell said. “[This] Demonstrates that this Administration really does hate the idea of election integrity.”
Virginia appealed the decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. The court ruled against Virginia on Sunday in the commonwealth’s appeal to keep the non-citizens off of its voter rolls.
Alabama and Wisconsin
Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alabama ruled against the state for trying to remove non-citizens from its voter rolls, after the DOJ sued the state in September. The DOJ’s argument was similar to its case in Virginia regarding the timing of the removal of voters, since Alabama announced its intentions 84 days before the election.
At the time of the announcement, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) said that his office, using data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, had identified 3,251 people who are potentially non-citizen voters. He said it’s possible that some people deemed as non-citizens by DHS later became citizens, and he was in the process of helping them verify their status.
The judge’s ruling in the case this month stated, “This year, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (1) blew the deadline when he announced a purge program to begin eighty-four days before the 2024 General Election, (2) later admitted that his purge list included thousands of United States citizens (in addition to far fewer noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote), and (3) in any event, referred everyone on the purge list to the Alabama Attorney General for criminal investigation.”
Allen’s office was directed to provide guidance to county election officials for restoring voters to the state’s voter rolls, announce the court order on his office’s website, and notify the state attorney general that the voters were inaccurately referred for investigation. Allen said he would comply with the court order.
The DOJ also sued two rural Wisconsin towns last month after they switched from including electronic voting machines to using only paper ballots in their elections and counting them by hand.
The Biden DOJ alleged that the towns and the state violated Section 301 of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) by not having an accessible voting machine for voters with disabilities.
One town, Lawrence, with a population of 301 people, settled, signing a consent decree with the DOJ last Friday. In accordance with the consent decree, the town board voted on Sept. 6 to rescind the January 2023 decision to not turn “on the voting machine.”
On the other hand, the town of Thornapple is defending its decision, saying that it is following the law by ensuring that voters with disabilities are in fact receiving the required assistance. According to the DOJ’s lawsuit, the Thornapple Town Board of Supervisors voted in June 2023 to “stop use of the electronic voting machine and use paper ballots.”
Thornapple had previously used Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCast Evolution machine to mark and count votes before the decision to maintain the paper ballot requirement. The town used only paper ballots this year in both the April presidential preference primary election and the August federal primary election at Thornapple’s sole polling place.
Earlier this month, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin granted the DOJ a preliminary injunction against Thornapple and its decision to only use paper ballots. Thornapple appealed the decision to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.
The America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is representing the Thornapple defendants in the case.
“Bullying”
Michael Berry, executive director of AFPI’s Center for Litigation, told Just the News last month that the DOJ should prioritize ongoing election integrity issues in larger cities, rather than paper ballot elections.
“It’s appalling that the Department of Justice is bullying and targeting a small town in rural Wisconsin over its decision to use hand-counted paper ballots,” Berry said. “I would think the United States Department of Justice has much better things to do with its time and resources, including fixing the rampant election integrity problems in many of our large cities. AFPI is proud to represent Thornapple, Wisconsin, as it stands up to the Goliath that is the Department of Justice.”
As the Justice Department has sued both Virginia and Alabama, Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky, who has previously served on the Federal Election Commission and in the DOJ, wrote a report on Wednesday explaining the department’s incorrect interpretation of the law regarding voter registration removals.
“No provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), including the 90-day pre-election deadline in Section 8(c)(2), prevents states from removing aliens who have illegally registered to vote from state voter registration rolls,” von Spakovsky wrote.
“The plain text of the statute does not require states to keep an individual registered who was never eligible to be registered in the first place, and any interpretation of the NVRA that would require states to keep an alien registered to vote when both state and federal criminal laws bar an alien from registering would render the NVRA unconstitutional.”
“States have both a constitutional and statutory right—if not an obligation—to remove aliens who are ineligible to vote in both federal and state elections from their voter registration rolls,” he later added.
“The 90-day deadline for systematic removal programs applies only to removing eligible registrants who have changed their residence. It does not apply to aliens who were never eligible to register in the first place, just as it does not apply to minors, fictitious registrations, fraudulent registrations of any kind, decedents, felons, and mentally incompetent individuals. There is nothing in the NVRA to the contrary.”
– – –
Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter at Just the News.
