Supreme Court clears Virginia governor to purge voters days before election

With just a week until the election, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed Wednesday that Virginia could continue to purge its voter rolls of suspected non-citizens.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had been pushing to clear illegal voters that he claimed were on the state's rolls, but was halted by a lower court order.

The Supreme Court allowed the purge to continue in its ruling Wednesday. The liberal justices dissented.

A Washington Post review of records and interviews with election officials regarding Youngkin's claims about purging more than 6,000 "non-citizens" from the voter rolls found that most of the purges stemmed from paperwork errors rather than actual cases of non-citizens voting.

Slate reporter Mark Joseph Stern wrote on X wrote Wednesday, "We know this purge has targeted qualified citizens."

"The Supreme Court's decision is extremely worrisome because the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 explicitly forbids systematic purges of voter rolls shortly before an election. It now looks like the conservative supermajority will let states ignore that prohibition," Stern also warned.

The Purcell principle says that no court can make changes too close to an election. This ruling overrode that long-standing precedent, said former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.