Youngkin promotes removal of 6,000 non-citizens as a result of election integrity measures

BRISTOL, Va. — On the campaign trail with Virginia Republican Senate candidate Hung Cao on Friday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted the fruits of his election integrity work — namely, the removal of more than 6,000 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls and the codification of the commonwealth’s paper voting system.

“We’ve been working to make sure that with the DMV and Social Security Administration data feeds, if you’re not a citizen, you’re removed from the voter rolls for the last two and a half years. We’ve gotten 6,000 of them.”

Speaking to a packed room on the second floor of Michael Waltrip Brewing Co. in Bristol, Youngkin elaborated on his newly announced Executive Order 35, which aims to protect elections in the state.

“We’re going to make sure the voter rolls are clean,” Youngkin said, describing tens of thousands of voters who needed to be purged before November.

“We found almost 80,000 people who sadly died, who were still on the voter lists. Last year, 80,000, they left,” he explained.

The vote-counting method has also been questioned in several states, including Virginia. But the administration has assured participants that under EO 35, every vote will have a paper trail in November.

“We also need to remind everyone that we have to count our elections fairly as well; we have 100% paper ballots in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We have counting machines, not voting machines, and they are not connected to the internet,” Youngkin said.

Virginia, seen as a swing state this cycle, has had a series of close elections in recent years, underscoring the importance of election security.

In 2020, incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger retained her seat in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District with 50.8% of the vote to Republican Nick Freitas’ 49.0%, winning by a mere 8,270 votes. She won by a larger margin in 2022, but will seek the office of governor of Virginia in 2025.

At the state level, Virginia had even closer elections.

In 2017, a seat in the House of Delegates — and the House majority for the following year — was decided by drawing names from a film can, when Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds tied with 11,607 votes each.

Youngkin has faced scrutiny in the past for his election integrity efforts, such as in 2023, when more than 3,400 voters were wrongly purged from the rolls. That came after data on felons whose rights had been restored but who had parole violations were reclassified as felons in a Virginia State Police database, making them unregistered to vote.

Voters who were mistakenly canceled were later restored.