The Biden-Harris administration has hauled two Republican states into court to prevent them from removing noncitizens from the voter rolls. 

As part of last Friday’s news dump, the administration’s Department of Justice announced on October 11 that it had sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over an order from to purge “noncitizens” from the ballot.

On August 7, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) issued Executive Order 35, which called for the state to assure every registered voter is a legal U.S. citizen. “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,” said Youngkin at the time. 

The Biden-Harris administration sued, claiming the action violates the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day Quiet Period Provision, which says states must curtail all such actions 90 days before an election. The DOJ filed a similar lawsuit on September 27 against the state of Alabama, after Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (R) announced he had instituted a “process to remove noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama,” on August 13.

“Only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in U.S. federal elections. That fact is not in dispute, and there is no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in the United States. But that is not what this case is about,” claims the government’s legal complaint against Virginia.

Yet in announcing the Alabama lawsuit, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said, “The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy.”

As this reporter has noted at The Washington Stand:

• In Pennsylvania, Department of State official Jonathan Marks testified that noncitizens voluntarily told the state they had illegally voted 544 times in elections held between 2000 and 2017 — representing one of every 172,000 votes cast in the swing state.
• An official review of Georgia’s voting rolls found 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote in the swing state between 1997 and 2002.
• Virginia removed 5,556 noncitizens from its voting rolls between 2011 and 2017. Noncitizens had voted 7,474 times between 1988 and 2017, officials found.
• North Carolina voter rolls showed 1,454 registered voters who “did not appear to be naturalized before Election Day 2014,” according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, and “89 attempted to vote.”

The action is virtually unprecedented. The Obama administration sued to stop then-Florida Governor Rick Scott from removing noncitizens (at Judicial Watch’s behest) in 2012. Conversely, the Trump and George W. Bush administrations sued states or localities (Kentucky, New York City, Maine, Missouri) for failing to maintain accurate voting lists, including removing noncitizens and the deceased. 

A majority of Americans worry that voter fraud will impact the 2024 election, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released earlier this month. Overall, 58% of Americans shared their concerns about election integrity in next month’s election, although that is driven by an overwhelming concern from Republicans. In all, 86% of Republicans, and 55% of registered Independents, say illegal voting could impact the election, as compared to 33% of Democrats (and just 29% of confirmed Kamala Harris voters).

Once cast, there is no way to differentiate which ballot belongs to a specific person; voter fraud is permanent. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the House must pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to address this “clear and very real threat” to election integrity.

“The reason our movement is called election integrity is not just based on policy and procedures, but also on the character of the individuals who comprise it,” said Election Integrity Network Executive Director Kerri Toloczko in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand.

“Thousands of patriotic Americans have given selflessly of their time to become experts on their states’ election codes,” said Toloczko in a separate instance. “They have tirelessly worked in the trenches on all the aspects of the election process, researching state and county voter rolls; finding thousands of ineligible registrations, mistakes, errors, duplicates, and the like; are volunteering to serve as poll workers and observers; and who love this country so much that they are willing to take the abuse leveled at them by the corporate media, the Democratic Party, state governments, and even the federal government.”

Nationwide, 47 close elections, including 29 ties, have already taken place in 2024, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation.