The Department of Justice is now arguing that the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day quiet period does not block states from removing individual voters flagged as potentially ineligible, a position that could help clear registrations before the November midterm elections. The filing lands as the department presses for access to voting records across the country and seeks to turn federal alerts into deletions on state rolls.
That matters because the quiet period is one of the law’s main safeguards. The NVRA says any program designed to systematically remove ineligible voters has to finish at least 90 days before a primary or general election, and it generally bars broad purges in the runup to a federal vote. The law still allows individual removals in narrow situations, including a voter’s own request, death, certain criminal convictions and mental incapacity when state law bars voting.
In its latest filing last week, the DOJ went further. It said the quiet period should not stop the federal government from running its own systematic check of state voter rolls and then handing states an individualized list of names to erase one by one. The department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for voting records and is trying to assemble a national voter registration list to compare against the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, known as SAVE.
The friction is built into the argument. The NVRA is generally understood to prohibit systematic removals within 90 days of an election, yet the DOJ says that ban applies to state purge programs, not to a federal review that ends with individualized removals. That reading would let the federal government drive a process that has the same practical effect as a purge even if each deletion is presented as a separate action.
Only a handful of courts have squarely addressed how far the quiet period reaches. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt to read the NVRA as allowing noncitizens to be systematically removed during that window, while the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 2014 in Arcia v. Florida Sec. of State that Florida could proceed under a narrow reading of the law. The Supreme Court may decide during its fall term whether to take up Mi Familia Vota v. Fontes, a case that could give the justices a chance to define the limit for the first time in a way that reaches beyond Georgia.
For now, the department’s position points to a larger fight over how close to an election voter rolls can be cleaned and who gets to do the cleaning. If the Supreme Court takes the case, it will not just be about one state’s list. It will be about whether the 90-day quiet period remains a real stop sign or becomes a thinner rule that still leaves room for removals before voters head to the polls in November.
