US judge bars Alabama from purging thousands of voters before election

Alabama cannot remove thousands of people from its voter rolls on the eve of the presidential election, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday.

The US district judge Anna Manasco, an appointee of Donald Trump, issued a preliminary injunction halting an effort by Alabama’s top election official to try to remove more than 3,200 people from the voter rolls who it suspected of being non-citizens until at least after the presidential election.

The office of Alabama’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, conceded in court filings this week that the list of non-citizens it had compiled was not accurate. At least 2,000 people of the more than 3,200 people were actually eligible to vote, the secretary of state’s chief of staff said in a sworn declaration. That means that almost two-thirds of the people on the list accused of being non-citizens were wrongly flagged. Civil rights groups and the Department of Justice had both sued Alabama, saying that the removals violated a federal law that prohibits systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.

“Alabama’s initial splashy announcement gave a total misimpression,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that helped challenge the purge. “It’s clear now that 63% of those people on the list were wrongfully on the list and were had to take time out of their lives and had to deal with this problem.”

Both the justice department and the groups challenging the program also said that the state was using unreliable methodology to flag non-citizens and that many eligible voters were being flagged for removal.

Allen said in a statement he would abide by the court’s ruling.

“I have a constitutional duty to ensure that only eligible American citizens are voting in our elections. State and federal laws are clear that only eligible American citizens can vote in our elections. Today’s order does not change that,” he said.

Kristen Clarke, who leads DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement that the action “sends a clear message that the Justice Department will work to ensure that the rights of eligible voters are protected”.

“The National Voter Registration Act’s 90 day Quiet Period Provision is an important safeguard to prevent erroneous 11th-hour efforts that stand to disenfranchise eligible voters,” she said. “The justice department remains steadfast in our resolve to protect voters from unlawful removal from the registration rolls and to ensure that states comply with the mandate of federal law.”

The justice department also sued Virginia on Friday over a similar program that has also drawn scrutiny for being inaccurate.

Both of the suits rely on a 1993 federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act, which creates a 90-day period ahead of any federal election in which states cannot systematically remove voters from their rolls. The buffer was designed to ensure that eligible voters would not be wrongly removed from the rolls at the last minute without any recourse.

On 13 August, 84 days before the November election, Allen announced that the state had identified 3,251 people on the rolls who at some point in time had received a non-citizen number from the Department of Homeland Security. Even though he acknowledged some of those people may have become naturalized citizens, he instructed local election officials to require all of them to prove their citizenship to vote and referred them to the state attorney general for possible criminal investigation.

Alabama and Virginia are both part of a handful of states that have loudly touted misleading efforts to remove suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls. Their announcement comes as Republicans nationwide have leaned into false claims about non-citizen voting to seed doubt about the outcome of the election.

In addition to halting the removals, Manasco’s order also instructs Allen to oversee a mailing to flagged voters informing them that they can vote. The notice must also tell voters that they are not subject to criminal penalties for registering or voting.

Manasco also ordered Allen to write to the attorney general and inform him that several of the voters sent for further investigation were wrongly included on the list and to identify those voters.

“We know from talking with our plaintiffs and from talking with others in Alabama that this really created a chill for naturalized citizens who were intimidated and deterred from registering to vote and from voting,” Huddleston said. And it’s really important that all Americans have access to the ballot.”