OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
5:46 PM – Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order on Wednesday with the goal of establishing better election integrity in the state.
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The order calls for the exclusion of “noncitizens,” whom many refer to as foreign nationals or illegal aliens, while establishing better procedures to prosecute them.
Executive Order 35, which was issued by Youngkin’s office, codifies election integrity in the state through a number of measures. These include improved voter machine testing, stricter ballot security protocols, and voter-list maintenance that fully detects and eliminates noncitizens from the voter registers.
The action expands on his administration’s past attempts to maintain election integrity, including an executive order from June that revised data-sharing agreements and expedited the removal of deceased voters from the rolls.
“The Virginia model for Election Security works,” Youngkin said on Wednesday in a release that announced the order. “This isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue, it’s an American and Virginian issue.”
“Every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines. In Virginia, we don’t play games and our model for election security is working,” he continued.
Additionally, the Virginia Attorney General announced on Wednesday that since taking on his role, his office had located and “deleted over 6,000 noncitizens” from the voter records.
There have been multiple confirmed instances of noncitizens enrolling on voter lists, Daily Caller reported.
By ordering the commissioner of the department of elections to confirm in writing that those who were unable to prove their citizenship will be removed from the state voter registration list, Youngkin’s ruling expressly targets noncitizen involvement in elections.
The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) must additionally confirm an applicant’s identity and legal status with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration database before granting them a driver’s license.
The executive order specifies what to do when a noncitizen tries to register to vote. Among other things, it says that the attorney general of Virginia has “full authority” to enforce the state’s election laws and to notify prosecutors when this occurs.
“We verify the legal presence and identity of voters using DMV data and other trusted data sources to update our voter rolls daily, not only adding new voters, but scrubbing the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved, and non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register,” Youngkin said.
In July, President Joe Biden opposed a House GOP bill that sought to strengthen election integrity, claiming that concerns of noncitizen involvement in elections were “easily disproven falsehoods.”
However, America First Legal filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in a related case across the United States, asserting that Maricopa County, Arizona, failed to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls. The group said earlier this year that over 35,000 registered voters in Arizona had not shown any proof of U.S. citizenship.
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