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This past week, my office received a startling email from a constituent: “Today, when I went to the Chesterfield County Library for early voting and presented my Driver’s License, I was told that I was not registered to vote. This was very shocking to me because I am 83 years of age, a military veteran who has been a registered voter for approx. 64 years.”
The idea that an American, a military veteran with a longstanding voting record, could have his voting rights removed by his governor, and removed so close to Election Day, is simply unacceptable.
Governor Glenn Youngkin now faces scrutiny over a controversial voter purge that has raised serious concerns about efforts at voter suppression in Virginia. His actions have targeted legitimate voters and disenfranchised those who have every right to participate in our democratic processes.
According to our local registrars, most of the 6,300 voters who were purged by the governor’s administration as noncitizens are actually legal voters who made errors in paperwork or in renewing their voter registration. As the Washington Post recently reported, “a review of state court records and interviews with elections officials found no evidence that any noncitizens have tried to vote during [Youngkin’s] term. … As few as three people have been prosecuted for illegal voting of any kind in Virginia between Jan. 1, 2022, and July of this year, the records showed. None of those cases involved a question of citizenship.”
Further, national data do not support the Republican Party’s deliberate efforts to spread misinformation that non-citizens are voting in elections. A recent study from the Pew Research Center estimated that the number of undocumented individuals now hovers just over 11 million in the United States (a figure that includes children), and evidence suggests that only a small fraction, often cited as less than 1%, have actually ever attempted to vote in recent federal elections. These numbers barely register a blip nationally and certainly do not impact elections in Virginia. State regulations for voter registration maintain the integrity of voter rolls in Virginia, and a systemic purge of the sort deployed by Youngkin affects individuals who have every right to participate in elections. Overall, the consensus among leading researchers is that illegal voting is not an issue affecting the integrity of U.S. elections.
However, attempts to sow mistrust in our elections do affect voter confidence and create voter anxiety. The Department of Justice is now involved in Virginia and rightfully so. Federal oversight helps to ensure that state-level actions do not infringe upon the voting rights guaranteed to all citizens. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted precisely to combat such injustices, providing a framework for federal intervention when states engage in discriminatory practices.
The lawsuits facing the Youngkin administration argue that Virginia’s program to remove ineligible voters is error-ridden because it uses data from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) that can be “faulty and outdated.” Faulty data from the DMV was, in fact, the reason that my constituent found himself ineligible to vote. He discovered that when he went to the DMV for a driver’s license renewal this March, the agency issued a new birth certificate that contained errors.
Purging voters this close to our federal elections is part of systemic efforts to suppress and disenfranchise voters. In a similar pattern, the Youngkin administration withdrew Virginia in 2023 from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a system that actually does serve to protect integrity and security by keeping registrations up-to-date and accessible for eligible voters. Virginia was the eighth Republican-led state to withdraw from ERIC. The withdrawal was haphazard and inefficient; it left our registrars scrambling to develop new ways to adequately update voter rolls in the 2023 Virginia elections. In response, the General Assembly passed two bills during the 2024 session that would have allowed Virginia to rejoin ERIC. Governor Youngkin vetoed both bills. If election integrity and clean voter rolls were the true goals of the Republican party’s recent efforts, Virginia would still be a member of ERIC.
Voter purges and attempts to suppress the vote deserve our full response. They often disproportionately affect marginalized communities, including people of color, low-income individuals, and the elderly. When the state engages in broad purging without robust safeguards, it risks creating an environment where valid votes are discarded, all while claiming to uphold the principles of democracy. Access to the ballot box is not merely a logistical issue; it is a fundamental right.
Ghazala Hashmi is a Democratic state senator from Chesterfield County.
