By: Breccan F. Thies in the Federalist | October 16, 2024 4 min read

The Biden-Harris administration is conducting an election interference campaign in Virginia by filing a lawsuit to ensure noncitizens remain on the voter rolls, but the commonwealth’s own Department of Elections (ELECT) has been complicit in registering ineligible voters for over a decade, according to one county Republican Party.

While the Biden-Harris election meddling comes after Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R-Va., removed 6,303 noncitizens from voter rolls between January 2022 and July 2024, the Fairfax County Republican Party noted that “from at least 2011” and “enabled by the Department of Motor Vehicles,” “Virginia bureaucrats allowed thousands of noncitizens onto Virginia’s voter rolls.”

The Fairfax GOP is fully supportive of Youngkin’s Executive Order 35, which removed the noncitizens, prompting the left-wing lawfare assault against the enforcement of Virginia’s constitutional requirement that an eligible voter be a “citizen of the United States.” Fairfax GOP Chairwoman Katie Gorka said that “Youngkin is defending the citizens of the commonwealth by cleaning up our voter rolls.”

Gorka told The Federalist, however, that “we feel very, very, very supportive of Governor Youngkin, that he has taken this stance. But I’ll tell you the other thing, only 6,303 have been removed from the voter rolls: I think the number is in the tens-of-thousands of those who should be removed from the voter rolls. And that’s why, we are both supporting Governor Youngkin, but saying we need to do more.”

In a scathing press release, the Fairfax GOP, which represents the commonwealth’s largest county by population, said that government bureaucrats dating back at least to the administration Virginia’s last Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, who took office in 2010, helped noncitizens register to vote illegally.

For a decade between 2013 and May of 2023, the DMV never provided ELECT with document numbers from noncitizens legally present in the United States, according to the press release. Using the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, those numbers are instrumental in allowing ELECT to verify the citizenship status of individuals registering to vote.

Furthermore, before August, when Youngkin issued Executive Order 35, ELECT did not use SAVE for verifying the citizenship of both new voter registrants and those already registered to vote, despite the fact that ELECT has had access to SAVE since 2014, the press release added. 

ELECT missed yet another verification capability available to it, according to the release, by declining to cross-reference the Social Security Numbers of voter registrations that do not come from the DMV with the Social Security Administration to make sure the numbers and names match federal records.

“We have hundreds of election workers and poll watchers to help protect the integrity of this election, but there is no way for us to verify if the people voting are citizens, because the DMV and ELECT keep that information hidden from the people they claim to serve—the citizens of Virginia,” Gorka said in the press release.

ELECT did not return a request for comment from The Federalist.

Institutional powers have stood in the way of basic election integrity standards for over a decade in Virginia, and it should be no surprise that far-left actors in the government and political activist power structure have been attacking Youngkin’s move to make sure noncitizens are not voting.

Not only has the Biden-Harris administration filed a suit to keep illegals voting, but the government has effectively joined forces with left-wing nonprofits, the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the League of Women Voters of Virginia, which filed a separate lawsuit.

“They want illegal immigrants to be able to vote” Gorka told The Federalist, adding Democrats want to obtain illegal votes because they are afraid of losing the commonwealth. “Virginia is absolutely in play. And I’ll tell you what I think is a really significant factor in Virginia: Is the Hispanic vote. We have a really large Hispanic population in Virginia and everywhere around the country, we are seeing them shift in significant numbers away from the Democrats and over to the Republicans. So, you put all this together, I think Virginia is not a positive scenario for the Democrats. They’re worried, and so, yes, they are fighting to keep every possible illegal on the voter rolls.”

Over the summer, the Trump campaign recognized that Virginia, which last voted for a Republican for president in George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, looked more winnable that it had in the past. The campaign at the time opened 11 new offices in the commonwealth.

Republicans also have major races for U.S. Senate, between Republican Hung Cao and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and U.S. House, with all eyes on Virginia’s open 7th District, between Derrick Anderson and Democrat Eugene Vindman, and Virginia’s 2nd District between Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., and Democrat challenger Missy Cotter Smasal.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.