The court ruling comes after the Justice Department and civil rights groups represented by the Campaign Legal Center challenged what the office of Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, has called “strategic efforts” to “remove noncitizens registered to vote” from the state’s voter rolls.
A federal law known as the National Voter Registration Act bans Alabama and other states from systematically removing people from their lists of registered voters within 90 days of a federal election, also known as the “quiet period” before Election Day.
In the decision, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, ruled that the state violated the NVRA’s “quiet period” provision and ordered Allen to put the voter removal program on pause through Nov. 5.