When it comes to hyping phantom voter fraud – most recently by noncitizens reputedly casting ballots in presidential contests, which is already illegal – Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin keeps playing lapdog to Donald Trump. The former president’s lies about the subject have earned tacit support from Youngkin and other Republican officials in the run-up to the November election.

They all know better. Shame on them for placating an insurrectionist, a convicted felon and someone whose incompetent response to the COVID-19 pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Remember this: Trump was so incensed that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 that he embarked on a discredited quest to uncover millions of undocumented immigrants who “all voted for Hillary,” he claimed. Trump’s biased commission ended with a whimper, after states refused to comply with the panel’s intrusive requests for voter data and opponents complained the panel wasn’t open with the public about its work.

I hesitated to write this column because it gives more oxygen to a lie about voting by noncitizens. Some noxious statements, though, must be repudiated.

This lie is just the latest from the Republican Party, as it provides a ready excuse for Trump if he loses a second straight election. GOP leaders are priming the pump for chaos if Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris wins.

Youngkin recently signed an executive order codifying “election security” measures that were already in place in the commonwealth. He noted the state Department of Elections had removed 6,303 noncitizens from the voter rolls between January 2022 and July 2024.

Trump then praised Youngkin on social media for “securing” November’s election in the state. By the way, Republican nominees haven’t carried Virginia since George W. Bush in 2004 – and Trump already has lost Virginia twice.

 Former President Donald Trump shakes hands with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin at a rally in Chesapeake, June 28, 2024.
 

No mention was made in the guv’s executive order of how many immigrants had purposely voted illegally, or whether some were confused and didn’t know it was against the law. I sought answers from the governor’s office, but a Youngkin spokesman didn’t return my calls and emails.

I wanted to know, among other things, why Youngkin signed the executive order just months before the November election, and why he didn’t say how many of those thousands of people actually tried to vote. Were any charged with a crime?

Republican lawmakers, including Trump, have lied repeatedly that illegal immigrants are overrunning the polls. That’s simply not the case.

Republicans know this, yet keep fanning the flames. We all saw how deceitfulness like that incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

Consider this:

• A study by the Heritage Foundation – the folks behind the ultraconservative, government-gutting Project 2025 – found just 24 cases of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. That’s an infinitesimal amount compared to the total number of votes cast.

• The Associated Press reported that Georgia officials in 2022 audited the state’s voter rolls looking for noncitizens.

Some 1,634 had tried to register to vote over a period of 25 years, but election officials caught all the applications; none actually registered.

• In North Carolina in 2016, an audit found 41 legal immigrants – not yet citizens – cast ballots, out of 4.8 million total votes. Not surprisingly, the votes made no difference in the results in any of the state’s elections.

• The progressive Brennan Center for Justice studied the prevalence of noncitizen voting, too. “Across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution,”

it said. “[I]improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.”

If your family wasted money at those minuscule rates, you’d be euphoric.

Alice Clapman, Washington-based senior counsel for voting rights at the Brennan Center, told me Youngkin’s executive order feeds disinformation about voter fraud.

“I think it’s a disturbing pattern,” she said. Similar announcements have occurred recently in other states with Republican governors, including Louisiana and Texas.

“The number of actual instances of noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare,” Clapman said, adding there’s a distinction between such people who register to vote, but then realize they can’t do so legally and stay away from the polls.

Clapman also noted that it would be extremely risky for noncitizens to cast ballots. They could be imprisoned and deported.

In Virginia, Youngkin has zero credibility on the issue of voting security and administration. He’s chosen partisanship over good governance repeatedly since taking office in early 2022.

He played coy during the gubernatorial party nomination process about whether he agreed Joe Biden won the 2020 election – a litmus test for Trump supporters. He participated in a discredited “election integrity” rally in Lynchburg.

Youngkin’s elections commissioner pulled Virginia out of what had been an uncontroversial, multi-state program to share accurate voter rolls known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, after it was targeted by conservative activists and conspiracy theorists. The decision emboldened partisan hacks and quacks.

A spokesman with the state Department of Elections told me his agency has “gained access to substantially more data to use in updating voter lists” since leaving ERIC. It now receives data from 42 states about voters who may have moved, compared to 25 states before.

The change, however, is a classic case of reinventing the wheel, because there was nothing wrong with ERIC in the first place.

Youngkin also has reversed the ease with which former felons could regain the right to vote in Virginia. We remain among the toughest states to do so nationwide, hewing to a state Constitution clause that’s racist.

States run by Republican governors, including Virginia, have made a lot of noise about one of Trump’s favorite talking points – noncitizen voting. It’s not a problem.

Youngkin and others shouldn’t bestow their imprimatur to someone who constantly lies – and stokes fear – to try to regain power. It’s dangerous.

The writer worked at the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot from 1997 through 2018. He previously worked at newspapers in Cherry Hill, N.J., and Detroit. This commentary originally appeared on VirgniaMercury.com