Youngkin touts removal of 6K non-citizens as a result of election integrity measures

BRISTOL, Va. – On the campaign trail with Virginia’s GOP Senate nominee Hung Cao Friday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin touted the fruit of his election integrity labor — namely, the removal of more than 6,000 non-citizens from the state’s voter rolls and codifying the Commonwealth’s all-paper balloting system.

“We went to work to make sure that with data feeds from the DMV and for the Social Security Administration, if you are a non-citizen, you were removed from the voter rolls over the last two and a half years. We got 6,000 of them.”

Speaking to a packed room on the second floor of the Michael Waltrip Brewing Co. in Bristol, Youngkin elaborated on his newly announced Executive Order 35, aimed at safeguarding elections in the state.

“We’re going to make sure the voter rolls are clean,” Youngkin said, going on to describe tens of thousands of voters who needed to be purged ahead of November.

“We found nearly 80,000 people who had died sadly, who were still in the voter rolls. Last year, 80,000, they came off,” he explained.

The method of counting votes has also come into question in a number of states, including Virginia. But the gov assured attendees that under EO 35, every vote will have a paper trail this November.

“We also need to remind everyone, that we have to count our elections fairly as well; we have 100% paper ballots in the Commonwealth of Virginia. We have counting machines, not voting machines, and they are not hooked up to the internet,” Youngkin said.

Virginia, seen as a swing state this cycle, has had a number of close elections over the past several years, emphasizing the importance of election security.

In 2020, incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger held on to her seat in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District with 50.8% of the vote to Republican Nick Freitas’ 49.0%, winning by a mere 8,270 votes. She won by a wider margin in 2022, but will go on to seek the Virginia governor’s office in 2025.

At the state level, Virginia has seen even tighter elections.

In 2017, one House of Delegates seat — and the Chamber’s majority for the following year — was decided by drawing names from a film canister when Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds were tied with 11,607 votes apiece.

Youngkin has come under scrutiny in the past for his election integrity efforts, like in 2023 when more than 3,400 voters were mistakenly purged from the rolls. This occurred after data on felons whose rights had been restored but who had probation violations were reclassified as felons in a Virginia State Police database, rendering them unregistered to vote.

The voters canceled in error were later restored.