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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Federal judge orders Alabama to reverse program that purged more than
3,000 names from state voter rolls
By Devan Cole, CNN
Updated:
3:32 PM EDT, Wed October 16, 2024
Source: CNN
A federal judge ordered Alabama’s Republican secretary of state on
Wednesday to more than 3,000 names from the state’s voter rolls,
agreeing with the that the purge took place too close to the
election.
“For decades, federal law has given states a hard deadline to
complete systematic purges of ineligible persons from voter rolls: no
later than ninety days before a federal election. This year, Alabama
Secretary of State Wes Allen blew the deadline when he announced a
purge program to begin eighty-four days before the 2024 General
Election,” US District Judge Anna Manasco wrote in a
Manasco, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald
Trump, added that Allen “admitted” that his purge program
“included thousands of United States citizens (in addition to far
fewer noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote),” and that the
secretary of state referred all of the individuals to the state’s
attorney general for criminal investigation.
The ruling is a major victory for the US Justice Department and several
voters in the state who sued Allen last month, alleging he unlawfully
removed 3,251 names from the state’s registration lists. It comes as
Republicans continue to make noncitizen voting a major issue ahead of
the 2024 election, even though voting in US elections by noncitizens is
illegal and exceedingly rare.
Manasco said the injunction will expire after the 2024 election.
CNN has reached out to Allen’s office for comment.
An attorney representing several voters in the state who challenged the
purge program described Wednesday’s order as “a win for voters and
for all Alabamians who value a fair and free election.”
“The evidence in court – which showed over a 60% error rate in the
state’s list – underscores the importance of the National Voter
Registration Act to protect voters from last-minute threats to their
voting rights,” Michelle Kanter Cohen of the Fair Elections Center
said in a statement.
Allen that he had begun a process of removing 3,251 individuals
previously identified as being noncitizens from the state’s voter
rolls – even as he acknowledged the possibility that some of those
people have since become naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.
But the lawsuits argued that the move ran afoul of the National Voter
Registration Act, which governs how and when most states can execute
large-scale changes to their lists of registered voters. The federal
law requires states to observe a 90-day quiet period during which
officials cannot “systematically remove the names of ineligible
voters from the official lists of eligible voters.”
Exhaustive studies from both liberal and conservative think tanks have
in elections where they are ineligible. Nonpartisan election law
experts say it’s almost always caught when it does happen, and that
it .
In a brought last week in Virginia, the Justice Department alleged that
state officials violated the NVRA “quiet period” by recently
purging voters flagged as potential noncitizens.
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