According to hundreds of Virginia state court cases reviewed by Radio IQ, confirmed cases of noncitizen voting don’t exist. But that hasn't stopped such rhetoric from popping up during this year's election cycle.
“Last year we removed nearly 80,000 deceased voters from our roles," That’s Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares in video posted to social media in August. "And shockingly, we also identified 6,300 noncitizens on our voter rolls. They have also been removed.”
Those 6,300 noncitizens were found over the course of the last two and a half years, but such removals aren’t uncommon. In 2020, Virginia removed about 800 noncitizens from the rolls and about 500 were removed in 2019.
Miyares didn’t mention the number of noncitizens actually voting in his video, but Mohamed Gula with the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights argues such omission is done on purpose
“All over the country, people who want to create confusion and sow the seeds of doubt in the integrity of our electoral system are hiding behind false fears and overhyped claims of voter fraud,” Gula told reporters in mid-October.
His group is behind the lawsuit against Governor Glenn Youngkin’s recent voter purge executive order targeting alleged non-citizens. Reporting has shown the removal of legal citizens as part of the process.
But Radio IQ’s review of over 650 cases of election-related crimes in Virginia’s state court system over the last 20 years found no instances of a noncitizen being convicted of voting illegally. Criminal prosecutions came from across the commonwealth; about 60 cases of illegally voting were found, but none involved citizenship status.
Over 48 million votes were cast by Virginians in the same 20-year-time period.
Not all court documents were available, but one instance, confirmed through the Virginia Court of Appeals, involved a noncitizen registering. It was part of a larger alleged false identity scheme, but there’s no mention of the defendant, who was technically eligible for United States citizenship, attempting to vote and the conviction was eventually overturned.
At a September meeting of the Virginia House Privileges and Elections committee, Delegate Cia Price asked Susan Beals, Commissioner of the state’s Department of Elections, if her agency was aware of any voter fraud.
“Do you have any actual statistics on Virginia’s instances of voter fraud? Whether its specific to someone who might have been registered because of their interaction with DMV, whether it translated into an actual vote?" Price asked.
"That’s a complicated question madam Chair,” Beals responded, highlighting a breakdown in the process: “We are not an investigative body, we’re not a law enforcement organization," Beals told elected officials.
"I do not have statistics on commonwealth's attorney investigations,” she said.
Hans von Spakovsky runs the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative. He's seen cases of non-citizen voting in other states, but not Virginia, though he's alleged such violations when he was on Fairfax County's Board of Elections over a decade ago.
He is among critics who say records like those flagged in Youngkin's purge are proof of a larger problem.
“So, what, there were 11,000 aliens removed from the rolls? And Virginia is really large, we’ve got six million voters [a year]," he quipped. "But I remind them in 2017, control of the statehouse came down to one race that was tied.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. He also tracks cases of noncitizen voting like Spakovsky, but he says the lack of prosecutions suggests concerns are overblown.
“When we look at noncitizen voting in general, we see in the very rare circumstances when it occurs its usually people with green cards who have made paperwork errors or simply signed a piece of paper not realizing what it said and unfortunately have broken the law in doing so," he said. "But, not intentionally, or with any intent to defraud the American public."
That points to the other hitch, confirmed in background conversations with Virginia Commonwealth attorneys, a defendant must be trying to willfully violate the law. Evidence of such intent was not found during Radio IQ’s review of fraudulent registration cases.
John Cano, an immigrant advocate with Virginia’s Legal Aid Justice Center, thinks he knows why noncitizens, even those who may have been somehow registered to vote, don’t get wrapped up in violating election laws.
He gives this notification during workshops for those seeking citizenship:
“Always do your taxes, always file your I-10. Don’t do fraudulent claims, and it's a fraudulent claim to say you’re registered and eligible to vote,” Cano warned.
Voting when you’re not supposed, a felony that can lead to deportation, also leaves a paper trail. It's something Virginia’s Legal Aid Justice Center advocates said further dissuades would-be citizens from voting illegally.
And considering that threat of criminal prosecution, Logan Churchwell with the Public Interest Legal Foundation argues there’s another way to look at alleged noncitizen voters. He advocates for changes to federal law which he said has allowed noncitizen voters to get mixed up in the system.
“These people are victims largely, but they're stuck between old law, old process, and people who need to enforce it but don’t want to and it's not their main job anyway,” Churchwell said.
Requests for comment and an interview on the voter purge program sent to Governor Youngkin and AG Miyares were not returned.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing Virginia’s effort to remove noncitizen voters. A ruling is expected any day.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
