(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge blocked Alabama election officials from carrying out a last-minute purge of names from lists of registered voters, finding the state “blew” a 90-day nationwide deadline to maintain the status quo ahead of the November election.
The order Wednesday is a win for the US Department of Justice, which sued after Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen announced in mid-August that he was directing local officials to remove more than 3,000 voters suspected of being ineligible to participate because of their citizenship status, even as he acknowledged that the list might include US citizens.
It’s one of two cases the Justice Department has brought in the final weeks of the campaign. Earlier this month, the department sued Virginia, arguing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin also violated the 90-day “quiet” period required by the National Voter Registration Act when he announced a voter roll clearance program in August. A judge has yet to rule.
Republicans and conservative groups have made the prospect of noncitizens voting a major issue this election cycle, but researchers have found that it’s rare.
The Justice Department historically hasn’t played a major role in pre-election litigation. Federal government lawyers are more likely to go to court to address broader “structural” issues related to voting rights as opposed to a “rapid response” approach, said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former senior official in the department’s Civil Rights Division.
But the department can jump into the pre-Election Day fray if there are “urgent timing considerations,” he said. The 90-day quiet period for voter roll culling would fall under that category because the risk of mistakenly disenfranchising eligible voters is too great, he said.
The department’s involvement in the voter roll cases has drawn criticism from Republicans, including presidential nominee Donald Trump, who said during an interview this week with Bloomberg News that he hadn’t “gotten over” the department bringing its latest case in Virginia.
Alabama faced two lawsuits after the voter roll purge announcement, one from the Justice Department and the other from a coalition of civil rights groups. US District Judge Anna Manasco heard arguments this week before announcing her decision. She wrote that Allen had violated the “hard deadline” under federal law for “systematic purges” when he announced his directive 84 days before Nov. 5.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement that the case “sends a clear message that the Justice Department will work to ensure that the rights of eligible voters are protected.”
A spokesperson for Allen’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Allen’s list was based on identification numbers issued by the US Department of Homeland Security to foreign nationals. The challengers argued that relying on that data would sweep up people who had since been naturalized. The judge wrote in her order that Allen had admitted that his list included thousands of US citizens.
Manasco wrote that the state could still remove names from voter rolls on an individualized basis — including if officials confirmed that a person wasn’t a US citizen — but that it couldn’t carry out a large-scale removal program during the quiet period.
In Virginia, Youngkin signed an executive order on Aug. 7, which was 90 days before Election Day, that included a directive for the state’s election office to certify that it was regularly removing people identified as noncitizens in Department of Motor Vehicles records who had failed to confirm their eligibility.
The Justice Department and voting rights groups that also sued argued that this was another “systematic” removal effort within the 90-day “quiet” period in violation of federal law. A judge scheduled a hearing for Oct. 24 in the case brought by advocacy groups and is considering combining it with the government’s case.
The Alabama case is Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice v. Allen, 24-cv-01329, US District Court, Northern District of Alabama.
(Updates with Justice Department comment.)
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