VACPUSA

by worker-correspondent Elijah Crawford

The Department of Justice has recently filed a lawsuit against Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin over a provision in an August executive order that would remove registered voters from the roll if they can’t produce evidence of citizenship after 14 days. The DOJ claimed that not only was the order implemented too close to election day, but that it also ran the risk of removing eligible voters- should they fail to prove citizenship in the time allotted. The order would also see voter checks being made daily, rather than monthly. The provision is part and parcel of a scare campaign to drum up fears of an army of illegal migrant voters that would crater Donald Trump’s re-election and ensure that the Demon-crats would stay in power. The executive order itself touted 6,300 illegal voters had removed between January 2022 and July 2024.

But an analysis by the Washington Post shows that out of the 6,300 only three people have actually been prosecuted for illegal voting. What about the rest? Apparently according to election officials that was the result of bad paperwork, wherein applicants simply forgot to check a box. So much for the illegal voter army. In fact this wouldn’t be the first time something like this would happen. Last October over 3,400 voters had been removed from the rolls. Now Youngkin actually acknowledged that this had been an error, caused by a “misclassification of felony probation violations as felony convictions” according to the Associated Press.

While Election Officials and State Police worked on identifying which voters were legit, Virginia Democrats had called on the DOJ to investigate the removals. Eventually Youngkin claimed that a “majority” of 3,400 had been restored, but Democrats were still not happy. An attorney working with The Democratic Party of Virginia as voter protections director said of the issue “First, we were told there was no problem. Then we were told it was small, contained problem. Now we’re told it is a massive problem, with numbers large enough to swing control of the General Assembly. All of this confirms Republicans cannot be trusted with Virginians basic constitutional rights.”

In response to the DOJ lawsuit, Glen Youngkin argued that he was merely acting in according with legislation put in place by his Democrat predecessor Tim Kaine in 2006. Said legislation requires names to be struck from the voter roll if the person “not known to be a United States citizen by reason of reports from the Department of Motor Vehicles.” The Code of Virginia requires that the DMV sends the list of non-citizens to the Department of Elections on a monthly basis. This obviously runs rough against Youngkin’s plans for daily name checks in order to remove any noncitizens from the rolls before and leading up to Election Day.

At the end of the day this policy will mostly affect marginalized communities, especially recently naturalized immigrants. Who now could potentially be barred from exercising their hard-fought right to participate in their host nation’s democracy. Not as a result any actual wrongdoing on their part but because of a defect in a Kafkaesque immigration bureaucracy, juiced by the hysterical whiplash generated by 9/11 and the War on Drugs. A bureaucracy that is being wielded as yet another weapon by Republicans in their war on Voting Rights and POC communities.