Courts in three US states have shot down GOP efforts to remove potentially illegal voters
The US Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin can go ahead with purging 1,600 names from the state’s voter rolls for failing to confirm their citizenship. While the ruling is a win for Republicans, courts in three swing states handed the GOP back-to-back defeats a day earlier.
The court’s six conservative justices agreed that the purge can go ahead, while its three liberal justices dissented.
Back in August, Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order denying the 1,600 people the right to vote if they could not prove their citizenship. A host of pro-immigrant activist groups sued the state, and won in a district court, with the judge ruling that Youngkin was not allowed make any “systemic” changes to voter rolls so close to election day.
An appeals court then sided with the governor, before the case made its way to the nation’s highest court.
Youngkin hailed Wednesday’s decision as a “victory for common sense and election fairness.”
However, Virginia is not considered a swing state, and judges in three more important battlegrounds dealt far more significant blows to the GOP on Tuesday.
In North Carolina, where Donald Trump is currently polling one point ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris, a federal court blocked a Republican attempt to remove 225,000 people from voter rolls for registering without showing any form of identification. Republicans have long alleged that Democrats oppose voter ID laws because they depend on votes from illegal immigrants.
In Pennsylvania, a district court judge tossed out a Republican request that the state separate overseas and military votes from those cast on election day, as these ballots could be requested without identification. Pennsylvania sent out around 25,000 overseas ballots this year, and Trump is currently leading in the state by less than a single point.
The GOP lawmakers who filed the request argued that by allowing ballots to be cast without identification “makes Pennsylvania’s elections vulnerable to ineligible votes,” and that foreign actors “could easily submit” illegally-requested ballots.
Meanwhile, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the state must accept mail-in ballots for up to three days after election day, even if these ballots are not postmarked. Trump claimed in 2020 that he was robbed of victory in multiple swing states by Democrats delivering “dumps” of mail-in and drop-boxed ballots to polling stations in the days after the election.
Trump’s lead in Nevada is narrower than in North Carolina or Pennsylvania, with the former president polling just half a point ahead of Harris. Trump lost Nevada to President Joe Biden by less than 34,000 votes in 2020.
In a social media post on Tuesday evening, the former president encouraged his supporters to “report cheating to the authorities.” Earlier this week, he warned that “those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted” should he win next week.
