The right to vote is one of the most cherished rights of any American citizen over the age of 18. However, there are several caveats to the exercise of that right, the most important being “American citizen.”
Several states are taking measures, they say, to ensure that non-citizens haven’t made their way onto the ballot. Lo and behold, the Department of Justice has been pushing back — and the media, in turn, is pushing back on anyone who characterizes the suits as an effort to keep those non-citizens on voter rolls.
So, what’s the truth? Here are the facts.
On Aug. 7, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Executive Order 35, which he described in a media release as an “executive order to codify comprehensive election security measures to protect legal voters and accurate counts.” Shortly thereafter, on Aug. 13, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced a purge of 3,251 individuals from that state’s voter rolls.
It’s worth noting that it’s unclear how many of the voters removed in both states, totaling a little under 10,000, were illegal immigrants, if any.
Earlier this month, the Biden-Harris DOJ announced it was suing both Alabama and Virginia, in both cases citing voters being removed from the rolls too close to Election Day.
“Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections,” the DOJ said in a news release announcing the lawsuit in Virginia.
“The Quiet Period Provision applies to certain systematic programs carried out by states that are aimed at striking names from voter registration lists based on a perceived failure to meet initial eligibility requirements — including citizenship — at the time of registration.”
“As the National Voter Registration Act mandates, officials across the country should take heed of the law’s crystal clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the media release.
“By canceling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate. Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period restriction to prevent error-prone, eleventh hour efforts that all too often disenfranchise qualified voters. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy and the Justice Department will continue to ensure that the rights of qualified voters are protected.”
In Alabama, few if any districts will be contested in the House of Representatives and the presidential vote is all but settled there in favor of former President Donald Trump, so the measure has little to no impact.
In Virginia, however, there are a number of swing seats that the 6,303 apparently ineligible voters could help determine which direction the election tilts — and, perhaps more notably, the numbers for the Democratic presidential candidate in the state have remained stubbornly close, despite the fact Virginia has become significantly more blue since the turn of the century.
In the case of the Alabama voter law, the argument could be made that Wes Allen signed the measure to purge the individuals less than 90 days before Election Day. In Virginia, where Executive Order 35 was signed exactly 90 days from Nov. 5, there’s less of an argument to be made.
“The Virginia model for election security works. 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. In Virginia, we don’t play games and our model for election security is working,” Gov. Youngkin said in his media release.
“We use 100 percent paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet. We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7. 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 non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register.”
It is, of course, illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. However, to the extent that the voter list is maintained daily, the DOJ maintains that it “violates the Quiet Period Provision” and makes legal citizens ineligible to vote.
However, the DOJ noted in its suit that the Department of Elections used state Department of Motor Vehicles data in the process of “compar[ing] the list of individuals who have been identified as non-citizens,” requiring registrars to “notify any matches of their pending cancellation unless they affirm their citizenship within 14 days.” That, it appears, is the reason for the suit.
Both Youngkin and the GOP standard-bearer, former President Donald Trump, have spoken out against the lawsuit.
“Virginians, and Americans, will see this for exactly what it is,” Youngkin said of the DOJ’s suit, “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the commonwealth, the very crucible of American democracy.”
He noted, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” that it was a decision “based on a law that was signed into effect in 2006 by then-Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine.”
“Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes and the Justice Department sued them, that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote,” Trump said in an interview Oct. 15.
Left-leaning PolitiFact tried to fact-check this statement, noting that “[s]tate citizenship records are not always accurate or up to date” and that The Washington Post had published an article stating that “a review of state court records and interviews with elections officials found no evidence that any noncitizens have tried to vote during his term in Virginia.”
However, as the Washington Examiner noted, that kind of fact-check cherry-picks statistics to underestimate the extent of the problem.
“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,” the Examiner’s board said in an Oct. 15 editorial. “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.”
The board also noted that “[w]hile 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.”
Furthermore, as the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal noted in a separate piece on Oct. 17, Merrick Garland’s DOJ made the move at the last minute — weeks before the elections, even though both Alabama and Virginia announced their intention to cull the rolls of non-citizens in August.
“Even if an eligible voter fails to respond to the notice and then gets removed in this way, he could always re-register, since Virginia lets its residents sign up to vote on Election Day,” the editorial noted.
“Mr. Youngkin is being sued for doing what any Governor is supposed to do,” the board said. “He says removing people who declare themselves noncitizens is common sense, while calling the lawsuit an attack on ‘the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.’ Many Americans have doubts — some justified, some not — about the integrity of their elections. Mr. Garland’s 11th-hour intervention will do nothing but stoke them.”
And if that wasn’t enough, correspondence from the Kaine gubernatorial administration to the George W. Bush-era DOJ obtained by Fox News showed that Virginia had sought — and was granted — Justice Department permission to exercise the new voting law.
So, why is the DOJ pushing back now? While it is illegal for a noncitizen to cast a vote in a federal election, it’s clear that these voters — whether they intended to or not — either didn’t provide adequate evidence of citizenship or aren’t citizens. In the case of Virginia, the individuals involved can still vote on Election Day if they have proof of eligibility.
Last week, a federal judge put the Alabama voter cull on hold. Youngkin and the DOJ are still duking it out. That suit remains the most important one — and the one that the Biden-Harris Justice Department is probably more anxious to have put on hold.
However, the facts are these: Virginia law is sufficient to allow those culled wrongly from the rolls to re-register by Election Day, the law in question was approved by the DOJ previously (when it was instituted under a Democratic governor), the initiative was announced 90 days in advance of the election and the DOJ’s late lawsuits are only bound to sow further mistrust in the system, to say nothing of their lack of merit.
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