The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed Virginia to purge about 1,600 people from its voter rolls, handing a temporary victory to Republican officials in the state who said the move was necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting.

The decision was provisional as the case moves forward, though it will apply to the election next week. The order, which did not include a vote count, gave no reasoning and was unsigned, as is typical in cases decided on the emergency docket. But it noted that Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the state’s request to continue the voter purge.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Republican of Virginia, welcomed the ruling, heralding it as “a victory for commonsense and election fairness.”

Voting rights groups like the Campaign Legal Center expressed dismay, saying it would “wrongfully remove qualified voters” in the lead-up to the election.

The case is among a handful of election-related disputes to reach the Supreme Court in the final days before Nov. 5. On Tuesday, the justices batted away a bid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped his independent campaign for the White House in August, to remove his name from the ballots in two crucial battleground states, Michigan and Wisconsin.

In early August, Mr. Youngkin signed an executive order to hasten the removal of suspected noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls.

Studies have found that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare — it is also illegal — though Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, have deployed the claim to stoke doubt about the outcome.

The Justice Department and civil rights groups had pushed back against the plan, concerned that it would ultimately remove eligible voters during a hotly contested presidential election. They pointed to a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, that restricts such purges in the period immediately before a federal election.

A federal trial court judge sided with the Justice Department and advocacy groups, ordering the state to reinstate the roughly 1,600 voters that it had removed from the rolls. The state, the judge added, should stop “continuing any systematic program intended to remove the names of ineligible voters” until the election. A federal appeals court agreed.