The Supreme Court’s order today letting Virginia purge some 1,600 non-citizens from the voter rolls could go a ways toward allaying jitters over election integrity as November 5 nears. The fact that the dispute had to be addressed by the high court, though, is in itself shocking. Chalk it up to a federal intrusion into state election laws, the so-called “Motor Voter” law, that required states to let people register to vote when they applied for drivers’ licenses.

The law, pushed through Congress by the Democrats and signed by President Clinton in 1993, re-emerged in the Virginia dispute after the Old Dominion sought to remove ineligible voters from its lists. These would-be voters had registered even though they weren’t citizens of America. President Biden’s Justice Department rushed to reverse the purge, pointing to the Motor Voter law barring states from cleaning up voter lists within 90 days of federal elections.

A federal district judge agreed, and an appeals court upheld the decision. To underscore the gravity of the matter — this is a case in which the president, and federal judges, were trying to force a state to allow non-citizens to remain on the voter rolls within days of a federal election. It’s no wonder the Commonwealth, in its appeal to the Supreme Court, called all of this not only a “violation of Virginia law,” but of “common sense.”

The quarrel is a reminder that today’s fretting over the sanctity of the ballot has roots in Democrat-backed measures to loosen, by federal diktat, voter registration policies. Motor Voter, after all, was enacted into law despite concerns raised by Republicans. When Congress had sent the bill to President George H.W. Bush in 1992, he vetoed it. The law exposed “the election process to an unacceptable risk of fraud and corruption,” he cautioned.

Motor Voter, after all, didn’t only turn the Department of Motor Vehicles into a de facto voter registration center. That in itself was bad enough, because at the time but three states required evidence of legal residence, much less citizenship, to get a license, the Wall Street Journal reported. The law went further, though, forcing states to let voters register by mail, and to allow for registration when residents visited welfare offices or applied for state benefits. 

The law fostered the idea of a link between voting and government services, and of registration as a kind of membership card for perks from the nanny state. What a gift to the Democrats. Plus, too, the law crimped states’ ability to remove voters from the rolls even if, say, they had not voted for years. Motor Voter fixed it so names could only be purged at an individual’s request, or if, say, someone took the time to present proof of a voter’s death or other incident.

“Everyone supports the right to vote, but an equally important right is the guarantee of elections that are fair and free of fraud,” the Journal declared in 1998 in an editorial excoriating Motor Voter titled “Sanctity of the Ballot.” The Journal warned then that “a growing number of states can’t guarantee the integrity of their results.” The result, the Journal predicted, will be “an increasing cynicism and disenchantment with the democratic process.” 

Which brings us back to Virginia’s quarrel with the Biden-Harris White House on voting integrity. The case is but one of several in which the high court is being asked to umpire state voting law disputes ahead of the rapidly-approaching election. The high court’s order today, upholding the law and common sense, is a promising sign that it will serve as a bulwark against attempts, by either party, to tamper with the fairness of the electoral process.