Purged

News item: “Virginia removes 6,303 ‘noncitizens’ from voter rolls, fueling fraud allegations.”—NBC News

The excuse? Errors made when people filled out paperwork or answered questions online. Translation: No fraud, just either inept citizens or overly complicated forms.

Rep. Ben Cline told FOX News that, “On the federal and state level over 8,000 registrations that have been flagged to non-citizens between 23 and 26 resulting in over 6,000 ballots cast since 2019 by those who should not have been able to cast a ballot.”

He went on to place the issue right at the door of the U.S. Senate chambers and the Virginia governor’s mansion: “We need to pass the ‘SAVE’ Act so that governors like Abigail Spanberger cannot obstruct the federal government.”

I asked the director of the Election Transparency Initiative, now part of the Heritage Foundation, Ken Cuccinelli, about how long it will take and how many of these discoveries will have to be made before people admit that non-citizens are changing election results.

“So never is the answer to your question for the lefties to go. And for the rest of us, I mean, honestly, I appreciate them removing 6,500 non-citizens. But the bigger problem is, of course, the same as in New Jersey, is they never should have been on the voter rolls in the first place.”

He added, “And they tell us we’re all crazy for suggesting there are any problems, even as they, like Gov. [Mikie] Sherrill, remove 6,500 people from the New Jersey voter rolls and 6,500 from the Virginia voter rolls.”

The blame for much of this, Cuccinelli says, can be traced back to “Motor Voter” automatic registrations at the DMV, exacerbated by states that decided that giving driver’s licenses to noncitizens was a good plan.

“It systematizes errors. And there’s no hurdle. It’s never been easier to register to vote than it is today, no matter where you live, whether it’s the Arctic Circle or the Deep South.”

To that, I asked Ken why he thinks they cling to all these COVID-19-era early voting schemes when voter turnout goes down each year.

He told me about Bill Gardner.

“Bill Gardner was the secretary of state for New Hampshire for over 50 years. And that means that the legislature, whether it was run by Democrats or Republicans, kept electing Bill Gardner, who is a Democrat, because they all obviously thought he did a good job.”

He told me that Gardner was invited to Congress by Democratic leadership to help them make their case for a federal takeover of elections (they don’t talk about that anymore).

“He compared, for example, Oregon, which is an all-mail voting state. The voter turnout had a teeny bump when they initiated vote by mail, and then it dropped and has continued to drop. Voter participation declines. There’s a certain amount of what they call logic.”

Twenty-three “blue states” (including Virginia) just lost in court trying to force the U.S. Postal Service to traffic mail-in ballots without verifying the states’ voter rolls against the federal records for citizenship and residency.

Their argument is that it’s a states’ rights issue and that the federal government has no right telling them how to do things in their states.

You know, like Alabama Gov. George Wallace did outside that schoolhouse.

Yes, I am saying this is a civil rights issue. The right of each U.S. citizen to be confident that his or her vote is not being voided by the vote of someone not legally qualified to cast one.

Ken added, “Let’s take Georgia. Jim Crow 2.0, you remember that? Oh, yeah. All this election reform will suppress the vote, including voter ID and all this other stuff. Well, what happened? In the midterm, in 2022, the next immediate election, they had the highest voter turnout ever. And the University of Georgia did a survey of Georgia voters after the general election and found that the percentage of black and white voters that responded excellent or good to their voting experience was literally tenths of a percent different. And the black voter response on negative voter experience was zero percent.”

So, are 6,300 votes enough to make a difference?

Ken said they already have.

“My governor’s race in 2013. Mark Obenshain was in a race [for attorney general vs. Mark Herring] contested by far less than the sixty-five-hundred margin.”

A lot less: 907.

Then Ken recalled, “Doug Wilder’s [gubernatorial] race. He won by 6,000.”

By the way, early voting in Virginia begins on Sept. 18.

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