Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy said Wednesday that the Supreme Court ruling allowing non-citizens to be removed from voter rolls is “kind of ambiguous.”
The nine justices paused a lower court’s ruling preventing officials from removing around 1,600 individuals who “self-identified” as non-citizens from the voter rolls just six days before the election. McCarthy said the decision is “ambiguous” as the justices did not clearly say whether states or the federal government have the power to make “clear guidelines” regarding election rules.
RELATED: Supreme Court Permits Virginia To Remove Noncitizens From Voter Rolls
“[The Supreme Court] could really have rendered a clear decision that would have set up clear guidelines for what the states have to do and then you would’ve expected the states to fix it,” McCarthy continued. “The thing is, I thought the court’s decision was kind of ambiguous, so they don’t really come out and say that the state legislature makes the rules and the courts and executive officials aren’t at liberty to change those rules in the run up and since they didn’t clearly say that, there’s a lot of ambiguity about who’s allowed to do what in the run up to the election. So we need clearer rules, the state obviously gotta do a better job, but they could be pushed to do a better job.”
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McCarthy said the idea that American citizens in Virginia could be prevented from voting under this law is “bogus,” and that the ruling “promotes election integrity” and upholds federal law.
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“This idea that this could prevent or mistakenly result in American citizens from Virginia not being able to vote is bogus because under Virginia law, let’s say they’ve taken you off the ballot mistakenly, under Virginia law, if you show up to vote on Election Day and you attest that you are an American citizen, they have to let you vote. So, there wasn’t a chance that an actual American citizen was going to be prevented from voting here. On the other hand, it is a federal crime for aliens to both represent themselves as American citizens in order to register to vote and it’s a federal crime for them to cast votes. So, Virginia’s law promotes election integrity in Virginia, it support federal law, and it doesn’t result in Americans being prescribed from voting.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan would not have agreed to remove the names from the voter rolls, according to the ruling.
Republicans have also asked the Supreme Court Monday to block a state ruling that allows people to vote provisionally when election officials identify a problem with their mail-in ballots.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.