Justice Department sues Alabama over its effort to remove more than 3,000 names from voter rolls too close to election

The Justice Department sued Alabama on Friday over the state’s recent effort to remove more than 3,000 names from its voter rolls, arguing the move violated federal law prohibiting such action from taking place too close to an election.

The Justice Department sued Alabama on Friday over the state’s recent effort to remove more than 3,000 names from its voter rolls, arguing the move violated federal law prohibiting such action from taking place too close to an election. Alabama GOP Secretary of State Wes Allen announced on August 13 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 in an 18-page lawsuit filed in federal court in Alabama, the Justice Department argued that the so-called voter roll purge 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.” “While more than 700 individuals impacted by the Program have since re-registered and returned to active status in the State’s voter registration records, potentially several hundred or even thousands more registered, eligible voters from the list – U.S. citizens – remain in inactive status, stand to be harmed, and risk disenfranchisement just weeks before the upcoming federal election,” DOJ attorneys wrote in the lawsuit. “The State’s unlawful actions here have confused and deterred U.S. citizens who are fully eligible to vote – the very scenario that Congress tried to prevent when it enacted the Quiet Period Provision,” the complaint said, adding that actions like Alabama’s “are more error-prone than other forms of list maintenance.” As CNN has previously reported, exhaustive studies from both liberal and conservative think tanks have found only a tiny number of examples of noncitizens voting in elections where they are ineligible. Nonpartisan election law experts say it’s almost always caught when it does happen, and that it isn’t a widespread problem plaguing US elections.