The Department of Justice has joined a challenge to the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day quiet period, arguing in a Georgia filing that electoral fraud concerns do not bar individual voter removals before the November midterm elections. The filing says states may act when voters have been flagged as potentially ineligible by the federal government, and the dispute now sits alongside a Supreme Court case that could shape how far that reading goes.
Last week’s Georgia filing came as the Department of Justice also seeks voting records from 30 states and the District of Columbia. The department is trying to assemble a national voter registration list and compare it with the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, or SAVE.
Georgia filing and SAVE
The Georgia case centers on an unredacted statewide voter registration list. In its filings, the Department of Justice argued that the NVRA quiet period does not stop states from removing individual voters if they have been flagged as potentially ineligible by the federal government. That position uses a federal verification process to support removals inside the 90-day window the NVRA gives states to finish programs that systematically remove ineligible voters.
The law generally bars states from purging registration rolls in the immediate runup to a federal election. It also contains exceptions for a registrant’s own request, a criminal conviction or mental incapacity that bars voting under state law, or death. The Department of Justice is relying heavily on a single line from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2014, when the court said in Arcia v. Florida Sec. of State that Florida could remove noncitizens from its rolls in a certain context.
Mi Familia Vota v. Fontes
The issue could reach the Supreme Court during its fall term through Mi Familia Vota v. Fontes. That case sits against a split in how the NVRA is being read: the Department of Justice says the quiet period does not stop individualized removals, while the NVRA is described as generally barring systematic roll purges within 90 days of an election.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Republicans’ attempt to read the quiet period as allowing noncitizens to be systematically removed during those 90 days. Few courts have expressly considered what the law prohibits, which leaves the Georgia filing and the Arizona case as the clearest vehicles for a ruling on how the quiet period works in practice.
Before the November midterm elections
Before the November midterm elections, the Department of Justice is signaling that it wants to cancel registrations across the nation. For voters on state rolls, the practical question is not the existence of the federal review itself but whether a flag from SAVE can be used to trigger removal while the 90-day quiet period is already underway. The court fight will decide whether that process stays limited to individual cases or can be used more broadly as states prepare for the election cycle.
