Justice Department sues Virginia over effort to reduce voter rolls close to Election Day

The Justice Department announced Friday that it is suing Virginia over its efforts to purge voter rolls within 90 days of an election, calling the state’s actions a violation of federal voting laws.

The suit comes about two months after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order requiring the state’s Department of Elections to conduct daily updates to its voting list, including comparing the list of identified “non-citizens” to the state’s existing list of registered voters.

Local officials are required to notify people found on both lists that their voter registration will be canceled if they fail to respond to the notice and affirm their citizenship within 14 days.

According to the Justice Department, some of the people identified as non-citizens are in fact U.S. citizens, leading to some voter registrations being cancelled unnecessarily.

“The Commonwealth’s unlawful actions here have likely confused, deterred, and removed U.S. citizens who are fully eligible to vote —the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision,” the DOJ said in its suit, referring to the purging of voter rolls within 90 days of Election Day.

In a statement, Youngkin called the lawsuit “politically motivated” and a “desperate attempt” to attack the election’s legitimacy.

“Virginians — and Americans — will see this for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy,” Youngkin said.

Virginia’s Department of Elections and elections commissioner — both named in the lawsuit — did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday evening.

This is the second DOJ lawsuit in the past month against a state for alleged violations of a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that says while states have the prerogative to clean their voter rolls for various reasons, they cannot conduct systematic removals so close to a federal election as those predominantly affected are often naturalized Americans.

The DOJ sued the State of Alabama in September over alleged violations of the so-called Quiet Provision.