Virginia asks Supreme Court to intervene in case that allowed noncitizens to stay on voter rolls

Virginia’s attorney general is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a decision by a federal appeals court allowing noncitizens to stay on the state’s voter rolls.

The appeals court was responding to a plea by the state to overturn a federal judge’s decision to back the Biden-Harris administration’s attempt to block Virginia from purging voter rolls of ineligible voters.

The appeal comes just nine days before the Nov. 5 general election wraps up.

Responding to an article by Politico detailing the decision by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, immediately announced that he would appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The ruling by the 4th Circuit said that purges of voters from the rolls are at odds with federal laws that prevent such purges from happening within 90 days of a general election “to ensure that people who are legally entitled to vote are not prevented from doing so by faulty databases or bureaucratic mistakes.” 

Miyares said in the suit that the federal law doesn’t apply to noncitizen voters. 

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” said Miyares in a statement. 

Miyares called the decision to challenge the Virginia law a “shameful, politically motivated stunt” by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice that further “weaponizes” the federal government.  

“That is the definition of lawfare. To openly choose weaponization over good process and lawfare over integrity isn’t democracy: it’s bullying, pure and simple, and I always stand up to bullies,” said Miyares.  

The appeals court ruling upholds a previous decision by a federal judge that reinstated 1,500 self-avowed noncitizen voters from Virginia’s voter registration database. 

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: only 11 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,” said Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin about the decision upheld by the appeals court. “Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.” 

Youngkin said that the procedure to remove noncitizen voters stems from an 18-year-old Virginia law, signed by then-Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat.  

The law was meant to be the failsafe against fraudulent last-minute voter registrations, without which legitimate citizen voters might not be able to cast provisional ballots, said Youngkin. 

“This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago,” he added. 

While the mainstream media and Beltway think-tank research claim that noncitizen voting is very small, other research, combined with revelations from individual secretaries of state responsible for voter data, show the problem could be much larger.  

A recent study by the independent news organization Just the Facts found “about 10% to 27% of non-citizen adults in the U.S. are now illegally registered to vote.”   

The raw numbers tend to bolster the study by Just the Facts.  

The Lion previously reported Pennsylvania recently purged 100,000 noncitizen voters from the database, and admits that another 11,198 noncitizen voters are still registered to vote.  

Pennsylvania has an estimated 9 million registered voters, which prior to the cleaning of voter rolls, would have made noncitizens account for a little over 1% of all voters.  

But those numbers don’t account for the surge in illegal immigration under the Biden-Harris regime since 2021, bringing the total foreign-born population in the U.S. to 47.8 million, over half of which, or 24.4 million, are ineligible to vote.  

Using Pennsylvania’s pre-purge numbers as a best case, and Just the Facts highest estimates as the worst case, that would mean between 1.8 million and 6.6 million noncitizens are registered to vote across an estimated U.S. voting population of 161 million.