The state of Virginia found 6,531 people on its voter rolls who had voluntarily admitted they were not U.S. citizens. It knew who they were. It had the data. And under Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger, it entered into a legal settlement with left-wing activist groups agreeing to pause the removal of those admitted noncitizens from the rolls for the 90-day period before federal elections.
Read that carefully. Not alleged noncitizens. Not disputed registrations. People who told the state themselves that they are not American citizens — and Virginia agreed to leave them on the voter rolls through November anyway.
Judicial Watch uncovered the arrangement through an NVRA data request to the Virginia Department of Elections. The organization’s long-serving president, Tom Fitton, posted the findings publicly Thursday, and within days Virginia finally moved to remove the 6,531 registrations — but only after Judicial Watch made the arrangement public and forced the issue. Without that outside pressure, those admitted noncitizens would have remained on Virginia’s voter rolls through Election Day by design.
The mechanism Virginia uses to identify noncitizen registrations is actually straightforward. When people apply for driver’s licenses, they voluntarily indicate whether they are U.S. citizens. The DMV runs that data against voter registration lists and flags the noncitizen registrations. The state then notifies those individuals and asks them to cancel their registration. It’s a clean, functional system — one that produced 6,531 confirmed noncitizen registrations.
And Spanberger’s administration agreed to stop using it for 90 days before an election.
The only honest explanation for that decision is that someone in Virginia’s Democratic administration calculated that leaving admitted noncitizens on the rolls during the election window was worth the legal settlement it took to make that happen. There is no other plausible reading. These aren’t disputed registrations. These are people who said they aren’t citizens.
Virginia now functions as a sanctuary state — a policy Spanberger has championed. The connection between sanctuary policies and voter roll protection isn’t subtle. When a state commits to shielding illegal immigrants from federal enforcement while simultaneously agreeing to pause noncitizen voter removal before elections, the pattern is coherent even if the intentions are deniable.
And the 6,531 number almost certainly understates reality. These are only the admitted noncitizens — the ones who were honest on their DMV paperwork. The number who registered without disclosing their status is unknowable without the kind of federal data cross-referencing that Virginia Democrats are fighting to prevent.
This is exactly what Trump’s executive order on mail ballot verification was designed to address — and exactly why the SAVE America Act matters. Virginia found 6,531 confirmed noncitizens, agreed to leave them on the rolls until public pressure forced action, and is now actively resisting federal requests for its broader voter data.
Judicial Watch forced Virginia’s hand this time. The SAVE America Act would make that fight unnecessary everywhere.