Virginia citizens make plans to vote after finding they’ve been wrongly purged from rolls

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — Phoebe Taylor was all ready to vote in Tuesday’s election. She even knew her precinct number in the city of Richmond off the top of her head.

So it came as a shock when a reporter informed the naturalized U.S. citizen, originally from Great Britain, that she’d been purged from Virginia’s rolls, along with about 1,600 others in the last two months, in an attempt prevent noncitizens from casting ballots.

“It’s irritating to me,” said Taylor, 26. “I wouldn’t even have known.”

Taylor is among 1,600 individuals whose voting status remained up in the air until Wednesday, when the U.S. Supreme Court said Virginia could go forward with its original plan to remove those voters from the rolls.

Last week, a federal judge and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered Virginia to restore the voter registrations. They ruled that Virginia had illegally purged the voters during a 90-day quiet period ahead of the election that’s mandated by federal law to ensure that last-minute mistakes don’t mistakenly disenfranchise voters like Taylor.

In Taylor’s case, she said she suspected that the error came about because when she first applied for a driver’s license in Virginia as a teenager, she was not yet a citizen. But she said she’s been a citizen for several years now.

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She also acknowledged that she doesn’t regularly check her mail and easily could have overlooked letters from the city elections office informing her of her removal and opportunities to correct it.

Another Richmond voter, 66-year-old Eric Terrell, said he had his voter registration mistakenly canceled. He said he learned about the issue because he called the elections office to inquire about the status of his absentee ballot request, and after a couple of calls they informed him he’d been purged from the rolls.

The elections office informed Terrell that he can go to the polls on Tuesday and cast a ballot through Virginia’s same-day registration process. The ballot will be a provisional ballot, but Virginia officials have said that 98% of provisional ballots are counted in the final tally.

As a result, Terrell said he wasn’t particularly worried about the snafu, which he believes resulted from checking the wrong box about his citizenship on a DMV transaction.

“As long as I can vote, it’s over as far as I’m concerned,” he said in a phone interview.

It’s not clear how many of the 1,600 registrations at issue involved citizens who should have been kept on the rolls. Advocacy groups and media organizations have turned up frequent anecdotal evidence of citizens whose registrations are canceled mistakenly.

A check by The Associated Press of just a small sample of the names on the list found people who both said they were wrongly removed as well as individuals who confirmed they were noncitizens and shouldn’t have been registered.

As a practical matter, anyone whose registration was canceled has the option for same-day registration, either on Election Day or during early voting, which ends Saturday. Anyone who registers must attest that they are citizens, but does not have to provide proof of citizenship.

Thalia Simpson, spokeswoman for Prince William County’s Office of Elections, said eligible voters affected by the removals should avail themselves of the same-day registration process, something she said voters of all stripes have been doing in large numbers during early voting.

It’s unclear whether the issue will have any real effect in Virginia. The 1,600 registrations account for less than 0.03% of the state’s 6 million registered voters.

“We’re not sure if this is going to have a big effect,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who serves as executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. ”It was a little concerning because there was strong evidence that there were at least some citizens on that list who were flagged. But on the other hand, Virginia also has same-day voter registration.”

Analysts say Vice President Kamala Harris is leading Virginia by a comfortable margin against former President Donald Trump. While the state was considered a battleground as recently as 2012, the Commonwealth has trended toward Democrats in the last decade. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine has an even larger lead over his GOP opponent, polls show.

It’s also a state where the former president has underperformed. Trump lost to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.

Still, Trump has not given up. He’s planned a campaign stop Saturday in Salem, Virginia, a day after campaigning in New Mexico, another state not classified a key battleground.

“We have a real chance,” Trump said while phoning into a Richmond-area rally on Saturday. “We’re just about even in the polls.”

Susan Swecker, the Democratic Party of Virginia chairwoman, said Trump’s visit to Salem would only widen Harris’ lead.

“Kamala Harris will win Virginia convincingly, as he knows, and any visit from this deranged lunatic will only widen the margin,” she said.

Not every voter wrongly stricken from the rolls was enthusiastic about casting ballots anyway. One of those voters — Abdullah Al Mosawa, of Alexandria, who became a citizen about five years ago — acknowledged he was unlikely to vote in this year’s presidential race.

“With the options we have now, if I try again, I would vote third party,” he said.

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Diaz reported from Arlington, Virginia. Associated Press writer Christine Fernando reported from Chicago.