DOJ urges Supreme Court to let states purge suspected noncitizens from voter rolls near elections

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division filed a brief at the Supreme Court urging the justices to take up a long-running Arizona voter-registration dispute and to resolve whether the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) permits states to remove suspected noncitizens from their voter rolls in the run-up to a federal election. The filing endorses a parallel certiorari petition from the Republican National Committee in RNC v. Mi Familia Vota as the better vehicle for the question, and follows a Ninth Circuit ruling that struck down Arizona provisions requiring documentary proof of citizenship and authorizing late removals as violations of the NVRA and the Civil Rights Act. "The NVRA does not prohibit States from removing noncitizens from their voter rolls," Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jesus Osete wrote.

The NVRA's 90-day "quiet period" has long been read to bar systemic voter-roll maintenance in the months before a federal election, a safeguard meant to prevent eligible, properly registered voters from being struck from the rolls by error-prone last-minute purges. The DOJ's position is that this protection does not reach people who, in the government's view, were never eligible to register because they are not citizens — a reading that critics warn would license exactly the kind of pre-election removals the quiet period was designed to prevent, given the documented error rates of noncitizen-screening programs.

The recorded event here is the federal filing itself: the executive branch formally asking the Supreme Court to narrow a statutory protection against pre-election roll purges. Whether the Court grants review, and how it might ultimately rule, are contingent future steps that this entry does not record. The filing is live and consequential regardless of those outcomes.