‘The plaintiffs are simply using the crisis to further weaken election security standards…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Election-integrity advocates already were on high alert over a series of proposals by Virginia‘s newly-empowered Democrat legislature to rejigger elections in their favor.
Now, a recently filed court brief by the Public Interest Legal Foundation and other watchdogs is calling attention to the more than 11,000 dead people on the commonwealth’s active-voter rolls.
PILF filed the amicus curiae brief as part of a lawsuit by the Virginia League of Women Voters against the Virginia State Board of Elections.
The feminist plaintiffs, backed by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union, sought to challenge a state requirement that absentee ballots be certified by a witness signature reaffirming the identity of the person voting.
The LWV claims that the longstanding precautionary measure should be scrapped due to current social-distancing guidelines related to the coronavirus panic.
Ironically, it comes amid a broader leftist push to move to an all-mail-in election, which critics note would pave the way for unprecedented voter fraud and mismanagement that would undermine confidence in the election and likely sway the outcome.
“Our election systems will be taxed enough under this pandemic—the plaintiffs are simply using the crisis to further weaken election security standards,” PILF said in a press release.
PILF cross-referenced the state voter rolls with the Social Security Death Index and published obituaries to determine the staggering number of non-valid voters.
In addition to finding 11,600 dead registrants, it found 1,772 registrations that went to commercial establishments instead of residences, as well as 592 voters who also appeared to be registered in another state.
Although states are required under the National Voter Registration Act to maintain updated rolls, several blue state officials and activist groups have prominently revolted.
That, in turn, has forced expensive and protracted legal challenges—including notable recent cases in California and Wisconsin—to ensure the integrity of elections while claiming their opponents want to “purge” and disfranchise valid voters.
Once a closely watched swing state, Virginia’s bid to entrench Democrat electoral advantages has been particularly egregious.
Within the span of a decade, while under the stewardship of corrupt Democrat governors Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, the once-red majority has undergone a dramatic conversion. As a result, some of its more rural counties bordering West Virginia have even mulled the possibility of secession.
Among their controversial pushes to tilt the balance in favor of Democratic majorities, both of the left-wing governors made massive efforts to pardon felons in the state and restore their voting rights. That has led, on several occasions, to allowing sex-offenders—including convicted pedophiles—to become eligible to hold political office.
The state’s current attorney general, Mark Herring, won his 2013 election by a margin of less than 1,000 votes amid much discussion about voter fraud. Prominent Democrat attorneys were able to reverse the Republican candidate’s election-night lead by furnishing—after the fact —bags of mysteriously uncounted ballots from left-leaning Fairfax County.
With Herring’s support, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder‘s National Democratic Redistricting Committee used the courts to force a redraw of Virginia’s legislative maps that was more favorable to Democrats, prior to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that ultimately rejected court interference in “partisan” gerrymandering cases.
Since then, Virginia Democrats have continued their efforts to flip the state, often through questionable practices, and with help from considerable outside investments by leftist mega-donors, they were able to reclaim the state legislature last November for the first time in two decades.
The legislature now has wasted little time in proceeding to enact other vote-grabbing measures, including a push to join the radical national-popular-vote referendum. That effort would eliminate the more conservative-friendly Electoral College and give states that turn a blind eye to voter fraud and illegal immigration a disproportionate amount of sway in the presidential election.
Hypocritically, a separate push aimed to change Virginia law from one that elects the state’s top three executive spots based on popular vote to one that would base it on the majority of voting districts (which the Democrat legislature and activist judges would then gerrymander to their satisfaction).
State Republicans succeeded in winning a small victory, however, after enough Democrats sided with them on a constitutional amendment that will establish a bipartisan panel to oversee future redistricting measures and give final approval to the courts.
Undeterred, leftists continued to work every possible angle to undermine the established electoral process.
PILF previously warned the state elections board that the ACLU activists’ demands for it to use its “emergency” powers to waive the witness requirement during the upcoming primary election violated the existing statute since there was ample time for them to supply absentee ballots.
“The primary is far enough off that this statute cannot be triggered,” it wrote in a letter last month. “Moreover, any utilization of this statute to change existing absentee ballot laws would be an abuse of emergency powers.”