The lawsuit against Governor Youngkin’s voter-roll cleanup is shameful.
The lawsuit against Governor Youngkin’s voter-roll cleanup is shameful.
U nderstand: The Biden-Harris administration, led as ever by U.S. history’s most politicized Justice Department, is now doing the very thing it has indicted Donald Trump for doing — and for which it would have him imprisoned for up to ten years. That is, it is conspiring to injure the people of a state, Virginia in this instance, in the enjoyment of their right to vote. That’s a felony violation of the civil-rights laws (§241), at least according to the indictment Biden-Harris DOJ special counsel Jack Smith has brought against Vice President Harris’s opponent (formerly President Biden’s opponent) in the 2024 election.
The administration is trying to influence that election by promoting voting by some of the more than 10 million illegal aliens it has ushered into the country. That is the upshot of the DOJ’s lawsuit against Virginia. Perversely, the administration will claim it is protecting American citizens from being denied their voting rights — inadvertently or otherwise. That is preposterous.
Under the leadership of Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, the commonwealth is enforcing a 2006 statute, signed into law by the then-governor Tim Kaine (a Democrat, now a senator, and the party’s 2016 vice-presidential candidate), which mandates that noncitizens be removed from the voter rolls. Virginia law requires election officials to challenge any voter they suspect of being an illegal alien. Those challenged may still cast ballots, but they must sign a statement under oath attesting that they are U.S. citizens — a requirement completely consistent with federal law, as we shall see momentarily.
The state has a compelling interest in following its law. When noncitizens vote, the votes of citizens in the state are canceled out and collectively diluted, a denial of their civil rights. In a tight race, as the 2024 election is expected to be, a few thousand votes by unqualified voters — which is to say, a minuscule percentage of the millions of aliens whose illegal entry Biden and Harris have willfully abetted — could determine the outcome, illegally depriving American citizen voters of the right to elect the candidate of their choice.
Indeed, according to the Biden-Harris DOJ’s aforementioned indictment of Trump, the civil rights of citizens are violated — even if there has been no obstruction of their right to vote, and even when they have in fact been permitted to vote — if a candidate avails himself of lawful processes to challenge election results (at least if a prosecutor decides the challenge is fraudulent).
Yet, Governor Youngkin’s state-law-directed protection of election integrity is being challenged by the Biden-Harris DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by the radical progressive Kristen Clarke — who, when we last took note, was under investigation for suspicion of lying to Congress and manipulating a witness in connection with her controversial confirmation.
According to the DOJ, Youngkin’s restriction of the voter rolls to qualified voters runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act. Clarke claims that under NVRA §8(c)(2) — codified at Title 52, U.S. Code, §20507(c)(2) — Youngkin’s restriction is illegal because (a) it constitutes a “systematic” removal of ineligible voters from the rolls, and (b) such programs must stop 90 days prior to an election for federal office. There are some exceptions to the 90-day rule — e.g., if the state is removing from the rolls the dead, those who have been convicted of crimes, those who are mentally incompetent, and those who have moved away. But those exceptions do not explicitly cover illegal aliens.
The DOJ’s objection is specious. While Youngkin has an overarching interest in preventing illegal aliens from casting votes, the state can only challenge and remove aliens from the rolls on a case-by-case basis, not systematically. Plus, as we’ve seen, state law allows challenged persons to vote as long as they attest under oath to being citizens. Ergo, the Biden-Harris DOJ cannot even pretend that it is protecting citizens from being inadvertently purged — legitimate American citizens simply need to attest that they are citizens; if the attestation is true, they needn’t fear subsequent prosecution.
The DOJ’s complaint about allegedly illegal “programmatic” initiatives is particularly rich coming from this administration. Biden and Harris have programmatically permitted hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens to enter the country and remain at liberty in violation of federal law. The administration has purported to do this under its parole authority. Under federal law, however, such authority may not be exercised programmatically, as Biden and Harris have done; parole may be extended only on a case-by-case basis, and only when doing so is demonstrably in the interest of the United States (which the mass admission of illegal aliens plainly is not).
Furthermore, the election in three weeks is a state election as well as a federal election. The commonwealth has an abiding interest in ensuring that only qualified Virginians vote in Virginia’s elections.
Finally, federal penal law makes it a crime for illegal aliens both to register to vote and to cast ballots. Under §1015, it is a crime, punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment, for an alien to make a false statement that he is an American citizen in order to register to vote. That, in part, is why Virginia law allows a challenged person to vote if he attests that he is a U.S. citizen — a false statement is prosecutable under state and federal law, so a non-qualified person is likely to think twice before perjuring himself. Moreover, under §611, it is a crime for an alien to vote in a federal election (punishable by up to a year’s imprisonment and a stiff fine).
Consequently, it is in the patent interest of the United States for Youngkin to press ahead with an initiative that vindicates Congress’s election-integrity laws as well as Virginia’s.
There is only one rational explanation for this ill-conceived exercise of prosecutorial discretion against the United States citizens of Virginia and on behalf of illegal aliens: The Biden-Harris administration is trying to influence the outcome of the election by enabling illegal aliens to vote. The expectation that illegal aliens will vote for Democrats and transform closely divided states into Democratic strongholds also helps explain why Biden and Harris dismantled American border security.