House, Senate Democrats press Garland, DOJ to investigate Youngkin-led voter purge

Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and the six House Democrats representing Virginia in Congress are asking the Department of Justice, for a second time, to investigate the Youngkin administration’s removal of Virginia voters from the voter rolls.

The first time the group asked for a DOJ investigation, back on Oct. 6, it was on the basis of a media report that had 270 voters illegally removed from the voter rolls. We learned last week that the Youngkin folks are now conceding that 3,400 people had been stripped of their right to vote.

“We reiterate our request that DOJ take immediate action to investigate how these removals happened and what is being done to ensure that those whose names were illegally removed from the voting rolls are informed in a timely and effective manner so that they are able to cast a vote in the November 7, 2023, Virginia election,” the lawmakers wrote in the Oct. 30 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

All of the voters who had been removed had been previously convicted of felonies, had their voting rights restored and then went on to violate the terms of their probation.

The state’s computer software had counted the probation violations as new felonies that disqualified them from voting.

The 3,400 – and counting? – who were improperly removed from the voter rolls appear to have been swept up in a December purge of more than 10,000 Virginia voters by the Department of Elections, which VPM News reported had targeted voters who’d had their rights restored but gone on to be convicted of a new felony.

The lawmakers, in their letter to Garland, noted concern that the information about the illegal voter purge “comes less than two weeks before Election Day and more than a month after the start of early voting.”

“The Department has indicated those affected voters’ records have been sent – and updated – to the local registrars who have then notified these voters via mail; however, it is not clear that these voters will receive the information they are reinstated in a timely manner. Further, the Department noted that 100 of the voters who were wrongly removed have yet to be reinstated and may not be notified of their reinstatement with sufficient time to cast a ballot in next month’s election,” the lawmakers wrote.