HAMPTON, Va. — Caroline Arthur calls Hampton home.
Yet she was one of the more than 1,600 Virginians removed from voter rolls in the weeks leading up to the election, a process that will continue after a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this week.
Arthur said, “Why did my name get pulled? What was the flagging criteria?”
The state said the aim was to stop suspected non-citizens from voting, but Arthur says she's lived in the U.S. since 1999, been a citizen since 2018, and voted in past elections.
So, Arthur says she was confused when the Hampton registrar said ‘citizenship’ was the reason she was removed from voting.
“She had told me that around July I had gone to the DMV, and I had filled out some paperwork and checked that I wasn’t a citizen. But I haven’t done that or been to the DMV or anything,” Arthur said.
A few months ago, Arthur said, she got a letter asking her to update her voter registration or be removed. She ignored the letter, thinking it was a scam, but it wasn’t.
A few weeks after that, Arthur received an even more urgent letter, stating she was removed from the voter rolls in Virginia.
“The letter basically said, hey, we need to confirm your citizenship, fill out this form, send it back to us, if you don’t you’ll be removed from the voting registration list,” Arthur adds. “By the time I had seen the letter the deadline had passed so thought it was probably fake anyways. I didn’t really think about it.”
Arthur tells us she since re-registered to vote in Hampton and cast her vote on Thursday.
Organizations like The League of Women Voters of Virginia are helping impacting Virginians who are eligible to vote re-registered ahead of Election Day.