U.S. citizens are among the voters removed in Virginia’s controversial purge

Nadra Wilson of Lynchburg, Va., was concerned and confused when she received a letter in the mail from local election officials notifying her that her U.S. citizenship was in question.

The notice said she needed to affirm she was a U.S. citizen within 14 days or her voter registration would be canceled. It was first sent to an old address and then was forwarded. By the time Wilson received it in October, the deadline had passed.

But Wilson was puzzled by the letter. "I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. — I'm a citizen," Wilson said in an interview with NPR before showing her American passport as proof.

Wilson, who works in health care, moved to Virginia nine years ago and first registered to vote there before the 2016 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court could rule as early as Tuesday afternoon on an emergency request to block a lower court ruling that orders the state to restore to Virginia's rolls Wilson and some 1,600 other registered voters. A voter removal program, the lower court found, purged them from the state's registration list in violation of federal law. The state's Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has said the program enforces a 2006 state law and removes noncitizens who are ineligible to vote. He issued an August executive order requiring county election officials to remove suspected noncitizens flagged by the state on a daily basis.

But as Wilson and other voters' stories show, the program has also erroneously ensnared U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote.

An emergency request to the U.S. Supreme Court

Civil rights groups and the U.S. Department of Justice sued Virginia over the program earlier this month.

Virginia is asking the high court to weigh in after U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled Friday the state program violated federal law by systematically removing voters too close to a federal election.

Under the National Voter Registration Act, during the 90 days before an election, states must pause certain kinds of voter list maintenance programs that systematically remove voters to ensure mistakes aren't made too close to the election. The so-called quiet period began this year on Aug. 7, the same day Youngkin issued his executive order.

Giles, who was nominated by President Biden, ordered Virginia to reinstate the 1,600 voters who were taken off by Wednesday. Her order also said the state could still remove noncitizens "through individualized review."

Youngkin blasted the ruling.

"This is a stunning ruling by a federal judge who is ordering Virginia to reinstate individuals who have self-identified as noncitizens back on the voter rolls," he told Fox News on Friday.

Wilson countered that Youngkin is "not correct" in how he has characterized the program given that it has also ensnared U.S. citizens like her. She described the state program as "very, very unfair."

Over the weekend, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court's ruling against Virginia. The state then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Because Virginia allows in-person voter registration through Election Day, there is still time for eligible voters to register and vote in the election, regardless of how the Supreme Court rules.

Yet some Virginia voters who were removed in error may have missed the opportunity to request an absentee ballot.

The litigation in Virginia comes during a campaign season in which former President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have repeated baseless conspiracy theories that noncitizens are poised to vote in large numbers this election. Critics say it is an effort to sow distrust in the election and lay the groundwork for potential election challenges. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal and state elections. A limited number of localities permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, such as school board.

Trump has mischaracterized the Justice Department's lawsuit by claiming the agency is aiming to put "Illegal Voters" back on Virginia's rolls and "CHEAT" in the upcoming election. There is no evidence for the claim.

Virginia is among several Republican-led states that have announced controversial new initiatives in recent months that purported to remove potential noncitizens but that critics say were overly broad and have also affected eligible citizens.

A federal judge in Alabama earlier this month halted that state's program to inactivate the registrations of 3,251 people the state suspected could be noncitizens. The secretary of state's office has so far acknowledged at least 2,074 of those individuals were eligible voters, according to court filings. The judge — a Trump nominee — said in an Oct. 16 hearing that the state "has identified a handful, at least four, perhaps as many as ten, perhaps more, noncitizens who were somehow on Alabama's voter rolls."

Errors from the DMV

Another Virginia voter, 22-year-old Rina Shaw, who said she was born in the state, had not realized that her voter registration had been canceled until NPR asked her about her registration status and she checked it online.

Shaw, who began voting in 2020, said she recently updated her voter registration at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles when she was getting her learner's permit and found the form to be "poorly designed."

She likely failed to mark a box that she was a U.S. citizen, because afterwards, she received a letter from her county election office notifying her that information from the DMV indicated that she "may not be a U.S. citizen." The notice asked her to affirm her citizenship, which she did, and then she mailed back the form.

Shaw acknowledged she likely missed the 14-day deadline to respond, though had not expected her registration would be canceled.

According to a spreadsheet of removed voters that was filed in court and obtained by NPR, it appears that Shaw's registration was canceled on Oct. 20.

Shaw called it "outrageous" that the state was removing voters like her "so close to the election" and gave so little time for voters to correct the mistake. "It's insane, I can't believe this has happened," Shaw said.

Wilson had also gone to the DMV to renew her driver's license not long before she got her notice of cancellation in the mail. She said she was later told she must have marked a box that she was not a citizen but told NPR, "I don't believe I did that."

Eric Olsen, the director of elections for Prince William County, is familiar with stories about DMV visits leading to Virginia voters being mistakenly flagged as potential noncitizens.

The DMV driver's license application has boxes at the very top, above the title, for people to indicate whether or not they are citizens. Olsen said "it just lends itself to people making mistakes or not seeing the information."

Olsen said that if someone is flagged by the state as a possible noncitizen, county offices like his must send notices asking them to affirm their citizenship and then must automatically remove anyone from the rolls who doesn't respond within 14 days.

In May, Olsen reviewed the records of the 162 people who his office had removed from the rolls over the previous year under this program. He said of the 43 people in that group who had previously voted, all of them had affirmed on earlier records that they were U.S. citizens, sometimes as many as "three, four or five times."

In those cases, Olsen said, "we would assume that more than likely they just missed this box on the form."

Lawyers for state election officials denied in court filings that Virginians who left the citizenship box blank at the DMV were flagged to be removed from the voter rolls.

Only voters who were removed after Aug. 7 are subject to the district court's order to be reinstated to the rolls.

It is unknown at this point what the citizenship status is of all of the 1,600 voters. There is no database of U.S. citizens to check against. Lawyers representing civil rights groups in the lawsuit have been attempting to contact everyone on the list.

Anna Dorman, an attorney for the nonprofit Protect Democracy which advocates for voting rights, said she has reached "numerous" citizens on the list of 1,600 voters and said there are signs "a lot of these people are citizens who have been unlawfully purged under this program."

Dorman and her colleagues have spoken with other U.S. citizens who visited the DMV right before they received cancellation notices from election officials.

Carolina Diaz Tavera, a naturalized U.S. citizen whose voter registration was canceled but who does not appear on the list of voters removed after Aug. 7, filed a declaration in the lawsuit saying she is concerned the state removed her from the voter rolls due to outdated DMV records since she was a legal resident when she got her driver's license.

Virginia's Department of Elections worked with the DMV over the summer to run people who had previously presented noncitizen documents through a federal database, SAVE, and flagged people who appeared not to be citizens, according to court filings.

Dorman said most of the people she has been able to reach did not know that they were removed from the voter rolls. "They either never got the flier from the government or they got it and they thought it was a scam," Dorman said.

As for Nadra Wilson, she arranged to take off early from work so that she could go to her county board of elections and straighten out her voter registration.

"I'm grateful that I was able to get it fixed," Wilson said. 

Wilson decided to vote early and was able to cast her ballot Tuesday during her lunch break.