The Democratic Party may claim it is not trying to do everything in its power to let noncitizens vote, but the Justice Department’s latest lawsuit against Virginia indicates otherwise.
On Aug. 7 of this year, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) signed Executive Order 35, which codified Virginia’s election procedures, including the use of only paper ballots, the use of counting machines rather than voting machines, strict chain of custody for all ballots, and the daily maintenance of voter lists.
That daily maintenance of voter lists, under Youngkin’s order, now includes data from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, specifically a list of all residents who identified themselves as noncitizens when filling out any DMV form.
That list is then sent to county registrars who check it against the existing voter registration list. If self-identified noncitizens are found on the voting list, they are notified that they have 14 days to affirm their citizenship or will be removed from the voting roll.
“This isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue — it’s an American and Virginian issue. Every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines,” Youngkin said at the time. “We verify the legal presence and identity of voters using DMV data and other trusted data sources to update our voter rolls daily, not only adding new voters but scrubbing the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved, and noncitizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register.”
Although Youngkin’s executive order was announced in August, the Biden-Harris Justice Department waited until Oct. 10 to sue to stop its enforcement. The Biden-Harris administration claimed Youngkin’s executive order qualifies as a systemic program for the removal of ineligible voters under the National Voter Registration Act, which the NVRA says is not allowed 90 days before an election.
The Biden-Harris administration complaint claimed in its opening paragraph that “there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in the United States,” but the rest of the complaint called that statement into question. The complaint noted that in September alone, 90 residents the DMV had identified as noncitizens were removed from the Loudoun County voter rolls. Importantly, however, the complaint did not allege that any of those identified noncitizens were actually citizens.
The complaint did note that before the 90-day window, Prince William County removed 162 DMV-identified noncitizens from its voting rolls and that 43 of them were “likely” citizens, but it again failed to identify any actual citizens who were improperly removed from the rolls. Even stipulating that all 43 “likely” citizens were citizens, that means more than 120 noncitizens had illegally registered to vote, and that is just in one county. When he announced the executive order in August, Youngkin said his efforts up to that point had already removed 6,303 noncitizens from the voting rolls.
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While Virginia has more than 6 million registered voters, making a mere 6,000 seem insignificant, competitive elections can sometimes come down to just hundreds of votes. One 2014 study of the 2008 election found that while just 6.4% of noncitizens voted that year, their votes were enough to swing some tight races and give Democrats the 60 Senate votes they needed to pass Obamacare on a purely partisan basis.
“Virginians, and Americans, will see this for exactly what it is,” Youngkin said of the Biden-Harris lawsuit, “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the commonwealth, the very crucible of American democracy.” Youngkin went on to pledge that he will defend the “commonsense steps” he took to maintain Virginia’s election security in court. For the sake of justice and democracy, he should prevail.