But wasn’t citizenship checked when registering?
To register in Virginia, you only need to fill out a form.
There is a box on the form to affirm your citizenship, but you do not need to present any documents that could be used to check your status.
Note that you must provide your Social Security number, if any, when applying to register to vote in Virginia. Therefore, if you do not provide your Social Security number, your application for voter registration will be denied. State and local voting officials will use your Social Security number as a unique identifier to insure that no person is registered in more than one place.
Again they already have checks in place and this is transparent tampering with voter rolls to help them in the election next week.
you must provide your Social Security number
I’m not sure what you mean by this. An SSN is not proof of citizenship, for example if you have a green card then you are eligible for Social Security but not eligible to vote.
Social Security Numbers for Noncitizens Generally, only noncitizens authorized to work in the United States by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can get an SSN.
Yes, but in getting a SSN the government already knows your citizenship status, and so when the voter registration workers check your information your SSN I would think would allow them to confirm your status (or lack of SSN as a red flag). Again the checks are in place already, this is just Republicans working around the rules to get them what they want. And sure people can reregister, but at least some of these people are going to be disenfranchised now and not see it as “worth the hassle”.
Edit - Also the SSN thing matters because of this quote from the article as the basis of this.
The state’s plan flagged people for removal if they check a box on a Department of Motor Vehicles form declaring they are not a citizen or if they leave it blank.
From my link @ SSA above.
You don’t need an SSN to get a driver’s license, …
So they are purposely using a form that means nothing to try and push their bad faith argument, and the Supreme Court just said “sure, why not!” instead of stopping them like the law and lower court said.
