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A federal judge has ordered Alabama’s election officials to stop canceling voter registrations temporarily, siding with the Justice Department’s contention that the state is violating federal law by purging its voter rolls so close to the election.
In a court order issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco wrote that Alabama must pause a program to remove people from its voter rolls and must restore the registration records of thousands of people that have already been removed under the program.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced in August that his office had removed 3,251 people from the voter rolls because they were associated with noncitizen identification numbers. He framed the purge as a crackdown on noncitizen voting — which is incredibly rare and already illegal, with steep penalties for such occurrences. Allen conceded in his announcement that some of the registered voters he removed may now be naturalized citizens, adding that all of those who were removed were nevertheless referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for “possible criminal prosecution.”
The Justice Department then sued Alabama, alleging that the voter purge program violates a provision in the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to complete the removal of ineligible voters from voter rolls no later than 90 days before federal elections. (The DOJ also sued Virginia over a similar voter purge program.)
Manasco wrote that Allen’s announcement of the program 84 days before Election Day “blew the [90-day] deadline.” His office is also required to inform the 3,251 people removed from the voter rolls that they are still eligible to vote if they meet voter qualifications, per the court order.
Ahead of the election, Republicans have launched an all-out effort against what is essentially an imagined problem of widespread noncitizen voting. Claims about noncitizen voting have been amplified by Donald Trump and his allies as they stoke fear about nonwhite immigrants and undermine confidence in the election. Voting rights advocates argue that these state efforts to pre-empt noncitizen voting are mostly ensnaring naturalized U.S. citizens.