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A federal judge in Alabama has blocked the state from implementing a mass purge of voter registrations just weeks before Election Day, landing a major blow to Republican-led challenges to voter eligibility.
A preliminary injunction — issued on Wednesday by Donald Trump-appointed Judge Anna Manasco — arrived days after the Department of Justice and civil rights groups filed lawsuits to stop the state from stripping voter registrations for more than 3,200 people.
Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen claimed that those voters were “issued noncitizen identification numbers,” and are therefore ineligible to cast a ballot.
But the lawsuits uncovered that voting-eligible citizens also ended up on that list, joining thousands of people across the country who were targeted for removal from voter databases in an effort that critics fear is a concerted mass disenfranchisement campaign to suppress turnout this fall.
While Trump promotes baseless claims that non-citizens are illegally casting ballots to rig the election against him, voting-eligible citizens are being swept up in Republican-led purges across the country.
Alabama’s purge appeared to run afoul of the National Voter Registration Act, which bans states from systematically removing registered voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election — a federally mandated “quiet period” before Election Day, when voters have only a narrow window to try to fix a state’s mistake.
Allen “blew the deadline” when he announced that the purge would begin 84 days before Election Day, then “later admitted that the purge list included thousands of United States citizens,” and referred anyone on the list to the state attorney general for criminal investigation, Manasco wrote in her order.
She ordered the state to pause the purge plan until after Election Day on November 5.
Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, which sued the state to block the purge, said the group is “celebrating this victory against the wave of voter suppression across the country.”
“This action sends a clear message that the Justice Department will work to ensure that the rights of eligible voters are protected,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement on Wednesday.
“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 added. “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.”
Last week, the Justice Department sued Virginia for its similar plan to remove thousands of names from the state’s voter rolls, which federal prosecutors said has “likely confused, deterred, and removed US citizens who are fully eligible to vote — the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision.”
Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin called the lawsuit “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy” of the state’s election.
Trump — who has amplified bogus claims that non-citizens are illegally voting in an apparent effort to lay the groundwork to challenge election results — has called the Justice Department lawsuits “the Greatest Examples of DOJ Weaponization” designed to “CHEAT on the Election” by letting “Illegal Voters” cast their ballots.
