I got an email this morning from a Brittany Yanick, a PR flack from K2 and Co., a St. Paul, Minn.,-based public-relations firm, regarding our story from last week on the Justice Department lawsuit on Glenn Youngkin’s voter purge.
“I wanted to flag that Tim Kaine signed the bill in 2006,” Yanick wrote in the email. “It might be worth asking him if he agrees with the DOJ lawsuit against Youngkin that would help illegal aliens vote in our election? And does he want their vote?”
There’s so much wrong here, though Yanick is correct to note that Kaine signed the 2006 bill that requires the Virginia Department of Elections to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.
ICYMI: Virginia: Justice Department sues Youngkin administration over voter purge
The DOJ lawsuit isn’t an effort to challenge the 2006 law, or about helping “illegal aliens vote in our election,” as Yanick, whose resume includes a year working as the deputy director of government communications in the Trump administration, tries to make it to be.
No surprise there, right, that a Trumper would frame the issue as being about helping “illegal aliens vote in our election”?
The suit is about how the Youngkin purge is in violation of a provision of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 known as the Quiet Period Provision, which requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
“By cancelling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate,” said Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at DOJ.
“Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period restriction to prevent error-prone, eleventh-hour efforts that all too often disenfranchise qualified voters. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, and the Justice Department will continue to ensure that the rights of qualified voters are protected,” Clarke said.
Youngkin, in defending his administration’s ramped-up voter purge, claims to have removed more than 6,300 non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls during his term.
A Washington Post analysis of that claim, though, shows that the vast majority of the removals were basic paperwork errors – the bulk of those involving people simply forgetting to check a box indicating citizenship.
The Post reported that a review of state court records turned up only three prosecutions involving illegal voting between Jan. 1, 2022, and July of this year.
“None of those cases involved a question of citizenship,” the Post reported.
Youngkin, defending his administration’s actions in an interview on CNN on Monday, did his best to come across as it being a totally benign, nonpartisan kind of thing.
“Whether we’re in Virginia or any other state, I just want to go back and reiterate that non-citizens should not be on the voter roll,” Youngkin said. “And when we know they’re non-citizens or suspect they’re non-citizens, we should have a process for checking that. And if they are citizens, they should be allowed to vote. Every citizen should be encouraged and allowed to vote.”
Sounds above board.
But then I get an email from a PR flack who used to work for Donald Trump, and you see where this thing is really going.
The line about asking for forgiveness instead of asking for permission would seem to maybe apply here, except that Youngkin and his folks aren’t even asking for forgiveness.
To borrow from Yanick’s email, I wanted to flag this in the event that you come across something on the google machine where it looks like the writer followed through on Yanick’s suggestion to ask Tim Kaine if “he agrees with the DOJ lawsuit against Youngkin that would help illegal aliens vote in our election,” and “does he want their vote.”
You’ll know you got yourself a lazy writer there if you do.
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Chris Graham
