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 and 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.

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.

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.