How Virginia’s voter roll purge could impact the election

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Just days before Election Day, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the state of Virginia will be able to continue to purge people from the state's voter rolls.

  The state has argued it's part of an effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls. But voting rights advocates have found several U.S. citizens were also removed from the rolls.

  NPR's Jude Joffe-Block has spoken with some of those voters.

  She joins me now.

  Jude, welcome to the "News Hour."

• Jude Joffe-Block, NPR:

  No, thanks for joining us.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So, the state of Virginia has removed some 1,600 people from its voter rolls since August. Why was it doing that purging in the first place?

• Jude Joffe-Block:

  So all states have an obligation to make sure that the voters on their rolls are eligible to vote.

  And what's really under debate here is how Virginia went about doing that and when Virginia did that. So, Virginia has this program under way to identify noncitizens on the rolls. But the argument being made is that they aren't narrowly tailoring it enough to only target noncitizens and that it's happening too close to the election.

  So, under federal law, there's a rule under the National Voter Registration Act that states have to stop this kind of voter maintenance 90 days before an election. But Virginia says that doesn't apply here because they're targeting noncitizens specifically.

  But we have seen that this program has ensnared U.S. citizens.

• Amna Nawaz:

  So tell me about that. You spoke to some of these folks who say they are U.S. citizens, they were erroneously removed from the rolls.

  How did that happen and what happens for them now?

• Jude Joffe-Block:

  There's a pattern where people have visited the DMV, and they at some point there must have made a mistake on a form where they identified — they marked a box identifying themselves as noncitizens somewhere in those forms. We're not really sure how exactly this happens.

  But after that visit to the DMV, they got a letter in the mail from their local election official, saying, we think you might not be a citizen. Please affirm your citizenship.

  We spoke to a voter, Nadra Wilson, who that letter was sent to the wrong address. It got forwarded. By the time she got it, the deadline had already passed. She was able to re-register. We spoke to another voter, Rina Shaw. She did get the letter in the mail letting her know that she had to affirm her citizenship. And she did send it back.

  But, even then, she was still not on the rolls. And she was able to call and sort that out. But all of this does take time. Both of those voters did end up voting early this week, though.

• Amna Nawaz:

  We spoke with Anna Dorman, who's an attorney working with this nonpartisan civil rights group called Protect Democracy that helps voters to restore their voter registration. Here's what she had to say about this.

• Anna Dorman, Protect Democracy:

  Especially within the new citizen community, there's a lot of fear. I have talked to people who have actually already fixed the problem with the registrar and affirmed their status and re-registered who are still scared to vote, because they think that they have gotten a communication saying it might be illegal for them to do so.

  There's another group of people who are pretty indignant and frustrated that this happened. I spoke to one voter who said, I'm supposed to choose my elected officials. They're not supposed to choose whether I get to vote.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Jude, even if it does end up being legally sorted out for individual voters, could this have some kind of an impact on the election?

• Jude Joffe-Block:

  I think this is a small number of people. This is 1,600 who've been purged so far in this election period, though there — there were actually people who were taken off the rolls even before August through this same program who — and we know some of those cases were eligible U.S. citizens as well too.

  Luckily, because Virginia does allow same-day registration, a lot of these people will hopefully realize that they can still vote. So, that is the silver lining here.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Let me just pull back the lens a little bit here, because this idea of noncitizens voting has really been elevated in Republican concerns, right, despite the evidence that points to the fact that this isn't really a big problem in the country.

  So, does this effort that we saw in Virginia tie in to those more national concerns and conversation that we have seen?

• Jude Joffe-Block:

  It definitely does tie in.

  This narrative has been a key talking point this election season. And we have seen other states take aggressive actions right before the election publicizing that they're taking noncitizens off the rolls. But really these efforts have also ensnared U.S. citizens. So, that happened in Alabama, where more than 2,000 — at least more than 2,000 U.S. citizens were swept up in an effort that was supposedly targeting noncitizens on the Alabama voter rolls.

  And election experts are suggesting that this false narrative that large numbers of noncitizens could vote could be used to lay the groundwork to sow doubt about the election and potentially be used for future election challenges.

• Amna Nawaz:

  NPR's Jude Joffe-Block joining us tonight.

  Jude, thank you for sharing your reporting and your insights with us. Appreciate it.

• Jude Joffe-Block:

  Thank you.