A Biden-appointed judge sided with the DOJ effort to restore aliens, who may not legally vote, to the state’s voter rolls — eleven days before the election.
At the behest of the Biden-Harris Justice Department, a Biden-appointed federal district judge has ordered the Commonwealth of Virginia to restore aliens to the state’s voter rolls, just eleven days before the November election.
As I detailed ten days ago, Virginia removes ineligible voters from the rolls pursuant to a state law signed by the state’s then-governor, Tim Kaine — a prominent Democrat who was his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016 and is now a U.S. senator.
Under the leadership of Kristen Clarke, a radical leftist whom President Biden appointed to run the Civil Rights Division, the Biden-Harris DOJ challenged the state’s purging of aliens from the rolls.
Mind you, it is a crime for an alien to vote in a federal election and to misrepresent himself or herself as an American citizen for purposes of registering to vote. Ergo, Virginia’s law not only promotes election integrity; it bolsters federal law. Moreover, when ineligible voters cast ballots, the votes of individual American citizens are nullified — and, collectively, the votes of Americans are diluted. Since this violates the civil rights of Americans, a properly functioning DOJ Civil Rights Division would be supporting Virginia’s enforcement of its statute.
Yet, the Biden-Harris administration went to bat for illegal aliens against Virginians. Clarke claims that the purge of aliens from the rolls within 90 days of an election is a “systematic” removal in violation of the National Voter Registration Act.
This is a specious objection, for the reasons on which I elaborated in the post linked above. Yet Judge Patricia Giles, who was placed on the Eastern District of Virginia bench by President Biden in 2021, has sided with Clarke the Biden-Harris DOJ.
Governor Glenn Younkin, a Republican, released the following statement this morning after Judge Giles ruled:
Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls. Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.
This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-Governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal–and the ultimate failsafe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens to cast a provisional ballot. This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.
Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency stay of the injunction.
Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, has also vowed that there will be a prompt appeal.
Whether the presidential election in Virginia will be close enough that the votes of illegal aliens and other ineligible voters could make a difference is impossible to say at this point. According to 538, Harris leads Trump by slightly less than seven points. (Biden carried the state by ten points in 2020.) The Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are more than a quarter million illegal aliens in the commonwealth; nearly 4.5 million people voted in Virginia in 2020.
In any event, the electorate at large appears to regard border security and the influx of over 10 million “migrants” into the U.S. during the Biden-Harris administration — which has strained the housing, health-care, education, law-enforcement, and other welfare systems across the nation — as major issues in the campaign. In polling, Trump is strongly favored over Harris on these matters.
The Biden-Harris DOJ lawsuit may help Democrats cheat at the margins — and there is no rational reason to bring such a lawsuit except to make it easier for aliens to vote illegally. Nevertheless, I sense this will be a net negative for Harris, maybe a consequential one, because it underscores that progressive Democrats have quite intentionally collapsed border security in the United States.