Alabama joins red states fighting to purge voter rolls in Virginia

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall joined a 25-state amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to grant Virginia’s emergency motion to purge its voter rolls.

“The Constitution gives States the power to detect and remove noncitizens on their voter rolls,” Marshall said in a statement Tuesday. “Shockingly, the Biden-Harris administration has demanded that federal courts intrude on that power—making it easier for noncitizens to vote in Virginia. States should not be required to wait and see if people who identify as noncitizens will vote. The Supreme Court must act to protect election integrity and state efforts to identify fraud before it happens.”

Alabama recently had its own program to remove more than 3,200 voters from the rolls struck down on the basis that Secretary of State Wes Allen launched the program too close to election day.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center’s voting rights program, said there are three problems with the purges in Virginia and Alabama.

“[One,] thousands of those people were citizens; [two,] it’s not clear that any were actually non-citizens; [and three,] purges like this are illegal within 90 days of a federal election,” Doyle said.

Federal courts in both Virginia and Alabama halted the state’s programs. In Alabama, the plaintiffs cited evidence of a 60 percent error rate in the program, which purged anybody who had ever been issued a noncitizen identification number.

Allen admitted when announcing the program that the purge could include eligible voters who had become naturalized, and the plaintiffs say that is exactly what happened. The preliminary injunction in Alabama’s case is based solely on the fact that the program was launched within the 90-day quiet period before the election with the judge choosing to revisit the merits of the program itself after election day.

The Virignia amicus brief argues that “There is no federal mandate that noncitizens be allowed to vote simply because their registration is discovered within 90 days of an election.”

State Rep. Mack Butler, R-Rainbow City, said Monday that Alabama is a “sovereign state” and should ignore the federal court order and continue its voter purge. So far the secretary of state has complied with the court order.

“Ask yourself: if this is really a problem, why do the efforts to solve it end up disenfranchising eligible voters and breaking the law,” Morales-Doyle said. “The truth is our elections are safe and secure. These conspiracy theories are being peddled to lay the groundwork to challenge the results.”