The Supreme Court just created an egregious loophole in an important voting rights law.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that at least 1,600 people — including some who are known to be U.S. citizens with full voting rights — can be removed from Virginia's voter rolls before Election Day. The conservative supermajority's order, issued on the shadow ballot, essentially repealed a landmark federal law that prohibits last-minute voter purges. All three liberal justices dissented. Ominously, the court's intervention signals to other states that they can begin last-minute purges and suppress the vote through legal trickery that Congress wanted to ban.

Wednesday's order is a major victory for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, in their push to expand states' authority to cancel voter registrations just before voting begins. And it's a clear violation of federal law. A federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, banned, starting 90 days before a federal election, any state “program” that “systematically” removes “ineligible voters” from official lists of eligible voters. Congress enacted the law in recognition of the obvious fact that these purges often caught up justified This also creates confusion among voters and endangers civil liberties. Yet, exactly 90 days before the November 5 election, Youngkin issued an executive order mandating a daily series of voter purges.

Youngkin claimed that the program was aimed only at non-citizens. But he lied: His program appealed to U.S. citizens in two ways. First, it targeted Virginians who had checked a box on a DMV form indicating they were not citizens. However, due to the poor design of this form, a surprising number of citizens accidentally check this box. Additionally, many foreigners who checked the box years ago have now become naturalized U.S. citizens, who are of course allowed to vote like any other citizen. Second, Youngkin's program compared the names of alleged non-citizens on the voter rolls with a database of non-citizens maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. Voters whose names allegedly appeared in the database were then removed. But this database is, as the government itself admits, incomplete and imperfect, and comparing its list with a state's electoral rolls can easily produce false matches.

These flaws are not speculation: reporters have already discovered, much to their surprise, that US citizens were involved in Youngkin's purge. Lawyers opposed to the program have also identified a number of citizens who should be removed from the country as part of the purge. If these citizens want to vote, they now have to register at the polls again (as long as they bring the appropriate documentation), cast a provisional ballot and hope that officials decide to count it.

Given the program's blatant illegality, a federal judge halted it on Friday. The US Court of Appeals for the 4th^Th Circuit kept it frozen in a Sunday order. Miyares, the attorney general, then petitioned the Supreme Court for emergency intervention, backed by 26 red states and a host of Donald Trump-aligned “election integrity” groups. Finally, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court stayed the lower court's order, allowing the purge to continue. The reasoning was not explained. Because the court issued its order on the shadow file without detailed briefing or written opinion, it did not indicate how each justice voted. But all three liberals noted their dissent, indicating it was most likely a 6-3 decision by the conservative supermajority.

The Supreme Court's action is truly shocking. It has been the law for more than three decades that states cannot do exactly what Virginia did here. Congress could not have made it clearer that these purges are prohibited because the threat to citizens' civil rights is intolerable. Just two weeks ago, a Trump-appointed judge in Alabama blocked a similar purge for this reason.

Why did SCOTUS intervene in the first place? His silence forces us to speculate. Perhaps the majority accepted Virginia's argument that its program was not the kind of “systematic” cleanup that federal law prohibited because it took an “individualized approach.” If so, then the majority has effectively abolished this law completely. The state merely compared data fields; it didn't Research each voter by name to ensure that they were in fact ineligible to vote. This program was therefore a prime example of a systematic purge. Or to put it another way: If this program was not systematic, then there is no cleanup and the federal ban has been declared void.

Similarly, Virginia argued that non-citizens are never eligible to vote and therefore cannot be “voters” that federal law protects. As the 4th^Th Circuit stated that this interpretation distorts the letter and purpose of the statute. It would create a loophole legalizing purges that Congress tried to ban under the pretense that the people targeted were not real “voters” at all. So the problem arises again: If this program is legal, then every state now has an easy trick to get around federal law, and Congress's order isn't worth the paper it's written on.

There is another possibility for SCOTUS' decision: The majority may have held that the lower courts' decisions violated the law Purcell Principle. This doctrine discourages judicial interference with voting rights shortly before an election to avoid confusion among voters. But that Purcell The principle cannot plausibly apply here because Congress has specifically mandated federal courts to stop states' last-minute efforts to clean up voter rolls. Use Purcell Tying the judiciary's hands in this situation would fatally undermine the crystal clear directive of Congress. It would prevent federal courts from fulfilling their obligation to enforce federal law. And not just any federal law, but the National Voter Registration Act, a landmark law designed to protect citizens' fundamental right to vote.

Perhaps the scariest thing about Wednesday's order is that it forces other states to also ignore the National Voter Registration Act, even though the law offers the strongest protections to voters. Whether the majority thought Virginia should prevail on the issue continues Purcellor both, there has been a green light for eleventh-hour purges.

By siding with Virginia less than a week before the election, the conservative justices have signaled to other states that they can systematically purge voters from the voter rolls — and if any justice tries to stop them, the Supreme Court will strengthen your back. Her decision is a terrible omen for other pending election cases that could lead to a close race for Trump. And beyond November, it appears that the National Voter Registration Act is in grave danger before the Supreme Court. Virginia set this dispute up as a test case and he won. The voter lists are now open. And his triumph could give other red states carte blanche to clean up their act on the eve of the future Choose.