As a blue state with Republican power over elections, Virginia draws GOP attention

Former President Donald Trump and his allies keep saying Republicans can win Virginia.

“Virginia is in play,” said Jeff Ryer, the Virginia spokesman for Trump’s campaign. “President Trump and Team Trump know Virginia is a battleground, which is among the reasons why President Trump will be holding a rally here on Saturday. ... Virginia is within the margin-of-error.”

It’s a position that raises some eyebrows in political circles. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points in 2020. The state has voted for a Democrat in the last four presidential elections. Polling shows Kamala Harris on track to win the state’s 12 electoral votes by at least a five-point margin.

But far-right personalities are spreading unfounded allegations of voter fraud in Virginia. And local election officials in at least one county are already arguing they shouldn’t have to certify the election results. Meanwhile, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans, successfully convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to allow them to purge 1,600 suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls just days before the election.

“Trump’s average here with the voters is around 44%,” said Neil Newhouse, who co-founded a polling firm in Virginia. “He gets no higher than 46% in any poll that’s been conducted and released to the public. It is a steep, steep, steep climb for President Trump to win the state.”

Virginia differs from many of the states expected to go for Harris in one important way: There is significant Republican influence over the way its elections are run, because it has a Republican governor, a Republican attorney general, a Republican majority on its State Election Board, and Republican majorities on its local election boards.

Though Trump's effort to reverse his defeat in 2020 focused largely on swing states where President Joe Biden's margin of victory was slim such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, a majority-Democratic state with so much Republican power over elections could be a powerful draw for challenges to election results in 2024.

Trump in 2020 filed a lawsuit to overturn the results in New Mexico, where Biden won by 11 points, and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since 2004. Republicans nonetheless sent paperwork to Congress and the National Archives saying they were the alternate electors for Trump who would cast their votes for him in the event his legal challenges were successful.

“I don’t think margin is going to be much of a barrier to those who oppose democracy,” said David Becker, the founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan group that works with election administrators across the country. “So we could focus on just the swing states, and I think that would be a mistake.”

Some Trump supporters say he can win Virginia if there is no cheating

As Election Day nears, the idea that Republicans can win Virginia is moving through right-wing media, even as the election forecasting website FiveThirtyEight puts Harris up by six points.

Sergio Mu?oz, a vice president for Media Matters, a liberal nonprofit focused on conservative misinformation, said right-wing media has been priming their audience on the idea that Trump is clearly leading, and that the Democrats are going to try to cheat.

Munoz said he is expecting "lawsuits from the Trump campaign and his allies in the Republican Party challenging results for Harris — across the country — even in states where any objective watcher would not have expected them to win."

On conservative journalist Ann Vandersteel's podcast in October, former Trump administration official William McGinley, who is the RNC’s outside counsel for election integrity, told people in battleground states to sign up to volunteer as poll watchers. He listed swing states including Arizona and North Carolina before adding, “I would even put Virginia and Minnesota on there.”

Elon Musk shared a post on X in October alleging that there were precincts in Henrico County, Virginia — a county just outside of Richmond where President Joe Biden in 2020 won with about 64% of the votes — where there were more votes counted in the 2020 election than there were registered voters. The county quickly debunked the rumor, but it was subsequently repeated by Seth Keshel, a prominent questioner of the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Tennessee podcast host Shawn Farash, who also goes by “Captain Deplorable,” said Oct. 15 on his Rumble podcast “Ungoverned” that there was recent polling showing Trump could win, but did not cite any polls. He argued the Department of Justice’s lawsuit to block Virginia’s voter roll purge shows Democrats are worried they can’t win the state legitimately.

“Why is the Department of Justice suing the state of Virginia if Virginia is safely in the bag for Democrats?” Farash asked. “The conclusion that requires the least amount of assumptions would be that they are counting on noncitizens to vote in Virginia to help tip the scales in favor of Kamala Harris. And that to me would mean, in a fair election, Virginia is in play.”

Youngkin, Miyares advance efforts against noncitizen voting

While noncitizen voting is an extremely rare phenomenon, Republicans have raised alarms about it in this election, with Trump and Johnson proposing a bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Youngkin has been an enthusiastic participant in his party's effort to end alleged noncitizen voting. First, Youngkin directed the state’s top election official to create a process for daily removals of potential noncitizens from their voter rolls. Then, he directed the state to run an awareness campaign targeting, among other things, illegal voting.

Federal law requires people to attest to their citizenship when they sign up to vote. A 2017 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found that found 30 cases of noncitizen voting, out of more than 23 million votes cast, accounting for .0001% of the votes in those places.

Under Virginia’s program, people are being sent notices that they were “declared noncitizen,” and are not being provided any information on how to re-register to vote, according to the Department of Justice’s lawsuit. The suit said local election administrators had no discretion under the program to prevent a voter’s cancellation, even if they have “reason to believe that the voter is a United States citizen.”

The suit said that in Prince William County, dozens of people who were removed earlier in the year were “likely U.S. citizens.”

Additionally, people who show up to vote will be greeted with signs saying noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote.

“I made it very clear that if you are a noncitizen and you vote, that is illegal and you will be prosecuted,” Youngkin said on a Sept. 5 call with the Republican Party for training poll watchers. “And that is going to be well communicated and posted in every precinct.”

Judith Browne Dianis, the executive director of Advancement Project, the civil rights organization that brought the first case against Youngkin’s voter roll purge, told USA TODAY that voter puges often end up targeting naturalized citizens who told a motor vehicle office years ago they were not a citizen but became citizens later. That happened in Texas five years ago, leading the state to question about 100,000 registered voters. The effort was rescinded after naturalized citizens who were targeted sued.

“(Noncitizen voting) is a story they want to sell in this election to delegitimize the outcome of the election wrongfully,” Dianis said, adding that the signs in polling places could "intimidate people."

"Noncitizens know they’re not supposed to vote," Dianis said.

In response to lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice and civil rights groups, two federal courts blocked Virginia’s voter removal program for violating federal law. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, appealed those rulings to the Supreme Court and won.

"This ruling ensures that – with less than a week before the elections – Virginians can vote with confidence knowing Virginians will be choosing our elected officials,” Miyares said in a news release.

A battle over election certification in Virginia

Near Virginia’s western border, two Republicans who sit on the three-person Waynesboro Board of Elections are suing the state, saying that they shouldn’t have to certify the upcoming election results if the results are counted using a machine. The effort is controversial even among Republicans. Voters are countersuing to force them to certify.

The lawsuit touches on two mainstays of the far-right movement that casts doubt on elections — that machines should not be used to count votes in American elections, and that local governments shouldn’t have to certify the results of elections that they are skeptical of.

The lawsuit could upend the process of awarding Virginia's 12 electoral votes to Harris. Under federal law, if a state does not send its electoral votes to Congress on time, those electoral votes will be deducted from the total number of electoral votes needed to win. If Virginia’s votes weren’t sent, a candidate would need 264 votes to win, instead of 270.

Nationwide, Republicans sitting on county boards have voted dozens of times not to certify votes of elections, rarely delaying the outcome of certification, but often sowing doubt. All of Virginia’s local boards of elections have Republican majorities because state law says the majority of appointees will be the same party as the governor, who in this case is a Republican.

At the event in September, Youngkin said those Republican majorities are “really, really important.” His office, which did not respond to USA TODAY’s requests for comment, previously told USA TODAY that he is committed to signing the documents required to declare the winner of the state's electoral votes.

Edgardo Cortés, the former commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections, told a court Tuesday there could be “cascading effects” on Virginia’s elections if Waynesboro’s board does not certify. Without the local certification, the Virginia Board of Elections would either not be able to certify state results or would have to certify without Waynesboro, leaving the state’s certification open to legal challenges, Cortés said.

Jennifer Lewis, a 43-year-old Democrat from Waynesboro, is one of five people who countersued the two election board members to force them to certify.

“This is not about Republican and Democrat,” Lewis said. “This is about election integrity."

Youngkin’s office did not respond to an inquiry for comment. The Virginia Department of Elections said it does not comment on pending litigation. Attorney General Jason Miyares' office told the USA TODAY Network they could not comment on ongoing litigation, but previously told Cardinal News his office expects to fight the Waynesboro board members in court.

Virginia uses hand-marked paper ballots throughout the state, counted by electronic tabulation machines, something that Youngkin has sought to clarify to election skeptics who are concerned about voting machines.

But Curtis Lilly, one of the two board members who brought the suit, said he was concerned about the possibility of tabulation machines changing votes. He said he didn’t think the machines were actually changing votes and did not offer any specific evidence of machines changing ballots.

Rich Anderson, the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, said he and the party can be confident in the machine counts because there are other verifications that take place.

“I urge the boards to certify to the State Board of Elections with confidence after the multiple checks and validations that take place on election night and after,” Anderson told USA TODAY in an email.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Conservatives raise voter fraud fears in Virginia