In this issue of EPEC Team Newsletter:
—Virginians’ Vanishing Right to Challenge Illegal Voters
—Download a New Tool to Track Virginia’s Controversial Election Laws
Virginians’ Vanishing Right to Challenge Illegal Voters
While Virginians were dealing with a rushed referendum in March and April on redistricting — which the VA Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional — the governor was signing a flurry of controversial election bills into law.
Chief among them is HB 640. As of July, it eliminates the process by which any voter could challenge, in a polling place on the day of an election, the right of any other voter to cast a ballot. As of July 1st, anyone who makes good-faith challenges to an elector will have to go to a Richmond court, and hire lawyers.
The impact emboldens unlawful balloting by removing a long-standing right in election laws that allow citizens to challenge whether their votes are being diluted by an illegal or ineligible elector.
Left-wing groups have targeted the long-standing process of challenging a voter’s eligibility by accusing any good-faith challenge to Jim Crow-era abuses that the Voting Rights Act abolishes. Their narrative is that voter fraud is “exceedingly” rare, while ignoring the growing cases of fraudulent balloting, and noncitizens with voting histories.
(See EPEC Team’s documentation of the more than 7,000 Virginia noncitizens who “self-identified” as ineligible to be on the voter rolls in the past three years. Before they were removed from the rolls, thousands racked up a history of felony voting violations that disenfranchised Virginia voters.)
Today, with noncitizens automatically flowing from the Dept. of Motor Vehicles’ system onto voter rolls in 19 states, the new Virginia law (HB 640) further curtails citizens’ rights to question whether a voter is eligible to cast a ballot. By removing deterrence measures, the law creates conditions that embolden election fraud — while eroding citizens’ right to be a part of their election process.
To find out more about the new laws that impact our elections and how elections are managed, EPEC Team encourages readers to download an Election Bill Tracker that was curated by the election security group Virginia Fair Elections.
Election experts Andi Bayer and Susan Hogge spent months following the Virginia Assembly’s debate and passage of the bills. They compiled the information into an easy-to-understand spreadsheet that is available to download, and will be updating the information on regular intervals as a service to the Commonwealth.
Download the Spreadsheet Here
The tracker list and new bills arrive amid a growing list of inconsistent appellate court rulings about the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) — which states, including Virginia, are using to block or redefine what are “reasonable” voter-list activities.
Inconsistent and even distorted interpretations of the NVRA are also leading to a troubling trend: voter-roll information that is increasingly opaque to citizen oversight, while dual standards of voter-roll maintenance proliferate among states.
A filing by the Dept. of Justice, which asked the Supreme Court to review an NVRA case involving Arizona, is one among many examples. Thanks to unclear rulings about the 90-day “safe harbor” rule, many states allow noncitizens to remain on the voter rolls leading up to elections. In Arizona, two laws now govern the state’s elections.
“The DOJ made its argument on May 26 in a brief urging the high court to grant the petition in the case of Republican National Committee (RNC) v. Mi Familia Vota,” Zero Hedge noted.
The DOJ argues in its brief that the NVRA’s restrictions on taking individuals’ names off the list of eligible voters in the 90 days preceding an election “do not apply to noncitizens who were never eligible to register in the first place.
The motion for review refers to a prior ruling by the Ninth Circuit as “badly mistaken,” which deepens a split among federal courts of appeals, and “risks significant harm,” said Hashim Mooppan, filing as acting solicitor general.
Using the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit, “a State could never remove a noncitizen from its voter rolls once registered,” he said. “That cannot be correct and cries out for reversal,” Mooppan said, urging the Supreme Court to grant the RNC’s petition.
Inconsistent rulings by courts regarding the NVRA have also been used to curtail transparency in voter rolls that are supposed to be made public, such as withholding the month and date of a voter’s birthday as part of their registration.
The overall trend is that courts are allowing voter-list maintenance records, which are critical to public trust in elections, to become the sole province of state election officials — without any oversight, not even by the DOJ, as some courts have ruled.
EPEC Team and its partners are committed to raising the public’s knowledge of the impact of these Virginia laws and how they related to national trends. We urge readers to download the tracker to understand the impact of trusted elections. More in coming reports. #