Voting rights advocates hail Virginia’s return to multistate voter roll system

Prominent voting rights advocates are applauding a new executive order returning Virginia to a multistate voter roll program and limiting when voters can be removed from the rolls before elections.

An executive order signed earlier this week by Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) reverses Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R)’s 2023 decision to leave the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a nonpartisan organization that shares voter registration and identification data between 26 member states.

The system helps identify voters who have died, moved out of state, updated their contact information, or had duplicate registrations in Virginia.

In addition, Spanberger’s order limits the removal of ineligible voters from the rolls to 90 days before a federal primary or general election. That will apply this year to the congressional midterm primary in August and the general election in November.

“With even more days of voting on our calendar this year, I’m acting early to strengthen Virginia’s transparent, robust voting process and protect the rights of all eligible Virginia voters,” Spanberger said in a release.

Joan Porte, president of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Virginia, told ARLnow that removing Virginia from ERIC made it difficult to exchange information to keep voter rolls accurate.

“What she did by returning us to ERIC is to make it easier for us to exchange information with these 27 states, so that we can check and make sure that if someone has moved, they should be removed from the Virginia voter rolls,” Porte said. “It just made total sense not to continue being ridiculous, because what they were trying to do is build (memorandums of understanding) with each individual state.”

Porte said that ERIC was the target of a “ridiculous conspiracy theory ” about voter fraud, which she said has been debunked by studies, including one by the conservative Heritage Foundation. She pointed to the example of election officers twice stopping Youngkin’s then-underage son from casting a ballot.

Chris Kaiser, a policy director at the Virginia ACLU, told ARLnow that Spanberger’s executive order responds to actions that blocked thousands of voters from casting a ballot in recent years.

By requiring the 90-day deadline for voter roll changes before federal elections and returning to ERIC, Kaiser says “the Commonwealth can restore critical guardrails against wrongful disenfranchisement, ensure clarity and integrity in Virginia’s electoral system, and reaffirm the unalienable truth that in order for democracy to function as intended, every eligible voter must have the opportunity to participate in the democratic process.”

The League of Women Voters of Virginia is involved in an active lawsuit against the state’s voter roll purges weeks before the 2024 general election, following an executive order by Youngkin. Porte cited a requirement in the National Voting Rights Act that voter roll removals cannot happen within 90 days of a federal election.

Porte said Spanberger’s order returns Virginia to the proper procedure for voter roll purges.

“It’s always important to have updated rolls and protected rolls, but you can’t just throw people off based on faulty data,” Porte said.

Some General Assembly legislation would help codify Spanberger’s order. SB 57 by state Sen. Schuyler T. VanValkenburg (D-16) — which would require Virginia’s membership in ERIC — is headed to the governor’s desk. Spanberger has an April 13 deadline to act on the bill.

HB 28 by Del. Rozia Henson (D-19), which would set the 90-day deadline for voter roll purges before federal elections, was tabled until 2027. The bill would also provide a process for a voter to confirm citizenship status before cancellation and increase the response period for voters to respond to a cancellation notice.

This story was originally published by ARLnow and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.