BRISTOL, Va. – On the marketing campaign path with Virginia’s GOP Senate nominee Hung Cao Friday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted the fruit of his election integrity labor — particularly, the elimination of greater than 6,000 non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls and codifying the Commonwealth’s all-paper balloting system.
“We went to work to ensure that with knowledge feeds from the DMV and for the Social Safety Administration, in case you are a non-citizen, you have been faraway from the voter rolls during the last two and a half years. We bought 6,000 of them.”
Talking to a packed room on the second flooring of the Michael Waltrip Brewing Co. in Bristol, Youngkin elaborated on his newly introduced Govt Order 35, geared toward safeguarding elections within the state.
“We’re going to ensure the voter rolls are clear,” Youngkin mentioned, happening to explain tens of 1000’s of voters who wanted to be purged forward of November.
“We discovered almost 80,000 individuals who had died sadly, who have been nonetheless within the voter rolls. Final yr, 80,000, they got here off,” he defined.
The tactic of counting votes has additionally come into query in various states, together with Virginia. However the gov assured attendees that underneath EO 35, each vote can have a paper path this November.
“We additionally have to remind everybody, that now we have to depend our elections pretty as properly; now we have 100% paper ballots within the Commonwealth of Virginia. We have now counting machines, not voting machines, and they aren’t hooked as much as the web,” Youngkin mentioned.
Virginia, seen as a swing state this cycle, has had various shut elections over the previous a number of years, emphasizing the significance of election safety.
In 2020, incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger held on to her seat in Virginia’s seventh Congressional District with 50.8% of the vote to Republican Nick Freitas’ 49.0%, profitable by a mere 8,270 votes. She gained by a wider margin in 2022, however will go on to hunt the Virginia governor’s workplace in 2025.
On the state stage, Virginia has seen even tighter elections.
In 2017, one Home of Delegates seat — and the Chamber’s majority for the next yr — was determined by drawing names from a movie canister when Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds have been tied with 11,607 votes apiece.
Youngkin has come underneath scrutiny up to now for his election integrity efforts, like in 2023 when greater than 3,400 voters have been mistakenly purged from the rolls. This occurred after knowledge on felons whose rights had been restored however who had probation violations have been reclassified as felons in a Virginia State Police database, rendering them unregistered to vote.
The voters canceled in error have been later restored.
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