There was a time when every election official believed in enforcing election laws. Partisanship had no role in securing our elections, in the good old days.
Virginia, sadly, shows that when Democrats win power, they do wild things that facilitate lawlessness in our elections, like making sure alien voting is consequence-free. This wasn’t always the case in America.
Consider Fairfax County, Virginia’s most populated county.
A recent party-line vote by the Fairfax County Board of Elections terminated the sensible policy of informing prosecutors when a declared alien is found and removed from the voter rolls.
The board has stopped telling law enforcement about a possible crime.
It is a state and federal crime for an alien to register to vote.
Notice I said alien, not illegal alien. Based on voluminous data I have reviewed, the problem of foreigners voting is overwhelmingly by legal aliens, not illegal ones. While some illegal aliens have gotten on the voter rolls, illegal aliens are a small percentage of the number of aliens who manage to get registered to vote.
Since 2020, the Virginia Department of Elections reports 13,700-plus non-citizens removed from Commonwealth voter rolls. Virginia is a pioneer in voter list maintenance focused on foreign nationals.
Virginia statute and regulations created a procedure to raise the alarm if an individual provides conflicting answers about citizenship status when applying for government services, such as a driver’s licenses and voter registration. Virginia officials then query the federal SAVE system.
SAVE is a constellation of immigration databases that is the single best repository of data as to who is, and is not, a citizen. The SAVE database populates with any foreigner who touches the federal immigration system.
If a voter is found to be in SAVE, they have 14 days to prove the government data false before removal from the voter rolls in Virginia.
This process, according to Fairfax County Electoral Board Vice Chair Megan Challender, is “burdensome” on officials and an “infringement” on those non-citizens removed from the voter roll.
Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, it is the law in Virginia. That’s the important part.
Challender, according to her biography, “has focused on increasing access to justice for individuals who could not otherwise afford legal representation, as well as promoting voter access and participation.”
Access to voting shouldn’t mean access to voting for foreigners.
The policy that Challender reversed was implemented in September 2024. It required that all registrants removed for citizenship defects were to be forwarded to prosecutors for potential investigation. If law enforcement wanted to determine whether a ballot was cast by a foreigner, they were required to collect vote history information from Commonwealth officials in a separate request.
Virginia has seen elections where a single illegal vote could have shifted the balance of power across Virginia. Control of the House of Delegates in 2017 hung on a tied election for a Newport News seat in the Virginia House. A court fight over a single ballot, which was eventually tossed from the count, triggered the tiebreaker protocol. Like most states, Virginia breaks ties with a game of chance. The lucky candidate was drawn from a bowl and the GOP secured control of the legislative chamber with a one-seat advantage.
The Virginia tiebreaker matter was an inspiration for the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s Tied Elections Database. There are more than 1,350 entries from recent years telling stories about the slightest hiccups in election administration leading to ties and high-stakes tiebreaker procedures.
Adding illegal voting to the mix makes the process even more toxic in our current political environment.
Watch for more radical pendulum swings from Virginia Democrats in the coming days. They seem to think their mission is the break down guardrails on our elections, just because they can.
This is a symptom of the reactionary approach to election administration we find along the ideological fringes. Watch for other county electoral boards to follow Fairfax’s lurch toward facilitating lawlessness. It’s what they do when a state flips blue.
