Youngkin administration improperly removed 3,400 Virginia voters from voter rolls

The report from VPM News that told us the Youngkin administration had improperly removed 270 Virginia voters from the voter rolls turned out to be a dramatic underestimate.

The Republican administration is now conceding publicly that its efforts at so-called voter integrity removed more than 3,400 properly registered voters from the rolls.

VPM News and The Washington Post both reported on a news release that was apparently sent out on Friday to acknowledge the error.

Augusta Free Press didn’t receive the release, and our search of the websites of both the Virginia Department of Elections and the office of Gov. Glenn Youngkin didn’t turn up the release that the two outlets reported on.

What was reported as coming from that release is that local registrars had reinstated all but “approximately 100” of the voters as of Friday.

Per the published reports, 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, per the reports.

Virginia is among a handful of states that strips people with any felony convictions of the right to cast ballots, a policy that the VPM News report reminds us dates back to the Jim Crow era.

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 said had targeted voters who’d had their rights restored but gone on to be convicted of a new felony.

Democrats are seizing on the ongoing bungled handling of the matter as “weaponized incompetence,” in the words of Aaron Mukerjee, voter protection director for the Democratic Party of Virginia, on the part of the Youngkin administration.

“First they said it was not a problem at all. Then they said it was a small, very contained problem. And now we’ve learned it’s a massive problem. I think it goes to the point that this administration can’t be trusted with the voting rights of Virginians,” Mukerjee told the Post on Sunday.