Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants you to believe that he’s trying to strengthen election security with a new executive order that he issued this week.
Which is curious, considering his vetoes of election-security legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year, including one that would have had the state rejoin the Election Registration Information Center, a national organization that helps ensure up-to-date voter rolls and helps voters register when they move.
Youngkin claimed in a statement included in a press release sent out by his office on Wednesday that his election-security push “isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue, it’s an American and Virginian issue,” adding that “every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines.”
His Executive Order 35, though, comes across as, “we’re going to keep doing what we’re already doing,” House Privileges and Elections Committee chair Marcia “Cia” Price, D-Newport News, told the Times-Dispatch.
“I think it was more political than anything else,” Price said. “If he wanted to do something about election security, we could rejoin ERIC, or he could have signed bills we passed than he vetoed.”
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Youngkin pulled Virginia out of ERIC last year, even after the Virginia Department of Elections, in a 2022 report, noted how the state’s participation in the organization had “streamlined” cooperation with other states in the sharing of voter-registration data.
The move to withdraw Virginia was in line with a push from Republican governors in several states who pulled out of the commission, which was launched in 2012, with Virginia, at the behest of the Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, one of the founding members.
In place of membership in ERIC, which has membership from 24 states and the District of Columbia, Youngkin had the state enter into an agreement with six neighboring states to share data and “securely compare voter lists and identify potential voter fraud.”
The governor vetoed a 2024 bill to get Virginia back into ERIC, and also used his veto pen to kill another measure that would have expanded the state’s existing ban on guns at polling places, prohibiting firearms within 100 feet of polling places and applying that standard to satellite voting sites and any buildings where recounts are being performed or where an electoral board meeting is taking place.
But what Youngkin wants you to do is ignore those vetoes, the story about the Department of Elections erroneously removing 3,400 voters from the voter rolls on the eve of last year’s General Assembly elections, and pat him on the back for putting out a new executive order.
“We use 100 percent paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet. We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7. We verify the legal presence and identity of voters using DMV data and other trusted data sources to update our voter rolls daily, not only adding new voters, but scrubbing the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved, and non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register,” Youngkin said in the statement in his office’s press release.
As Cia Price said, we were already doing all of that.
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Chris Graham
