BREAKING: Virginia Removes 6,531 Declared Noncitizens From Voter Rolls in…

Virginia has confirmed that it cancelled 6,531 voter registrations belonging to declared noncitizens over a two-year period, a disclosure obtained by the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch that has reignited debate over how seriously blue-leaning states are actually taking election integrity, even as the commonwealth was simultaneously forced by a legal settlement to pause its noncitizen removal program in the run up to a federal election.

The records, covering removals between June 2024 and June 2026, were released by the Virginia Department of Elections in response to a public records request Judicial Watch filed under the National Voter Registration Act. According to the group, the state produced no information about whether any of the 6,531 individuals actually cast ballots before their registrations were cancelled, a gap that Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called disturbing beyond belief given how many noncitizens were apparently able to register in the first place.

It is important to understand exactly what these numbers do and do not represent. The 6,531 figure only reflects registered voters who voluntarily declared themselves noncitizens, typically through interactions with the Department of Motor Vehicles when applying for or renewing a license or state identification document. Virginia’s removal process works by having the DMV compile a list of anyone who has indicated noncitizen status, cross-reference that list against federal Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration databases, and then pass the results to the Department of Elections, which notifies flagged individuals that their registration will be cancelled unless they can prove citizenship within a set window.

Because the system relies on self-declared status, Judicial Watch and other election integrity advocates have repeatedly warned that the true number of noncitizens on Virginia’s rolls could be considerably higher, since nothing compels a noncitizen who wants to remain registered to disclose their status honestly.

The process itself traces back to a 2006 law signed by then Democratic Governor Tim Kaine, a detail conservatives have been quick to point out whenever critics attempt to paint noncitizen voter roll maintenance as a partisan Republican innovation. Then Governor Glenn Youngkin built on that existing legal framework in August 2024, issuing an executive order that directed the Commissioner of the Department of Elections to update voter rolls daily and remove noncitizens who failed to provide proof of citizenship within fourteen days, a far more aggressive and continuous process than the state had previously employed.

That more aggressive posture immediately ran into legal trouble. Because Youngkin’s order took effect close to the 2024 general election, it collided with the so-called ninety-day quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act, a federal provision that bars systematic voter roll purges within ninety days of a federal election in order to prevent eligible voters from being mistakenly disenfranchised right before they head to the polls.

The Department of Justice under the outgoing Biden administration, along with the Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights and allied groups, sued to block the continued removals, arguing the process disproportionately swept up naturalized citizens who had, in fact, become fully eligible to vote.

The dispute escalated all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which issued an emergency stay in October 2024 preventing Virginia from being forced to reinstate roughly 1,600 individuals who had already been removed from the rolls as part of the crackdown, a significant procedural win for election integrity advocates at the time. But the underlying legal fight over the ninety-day quiet period was not fully resolved by that stay, and the litigation continued well into 2026.

In April 2026, Virginia ultimately agreed to a settlement with the Campaign Legal Center and allied groups requiring the state to pause its systematic noncitizen removal program during the ninety-day window before future federal elections, a deal those groups celebrated as a major victory that would stop what they characterized as an illegal purge program disproportionately harming naturalized citizens. For a period, that settlement effectively meant Virginia’s aggressive daily removal process, the one Youngkin had implemented, was put on hold heading into the 2026 election cycle.

That is precisely why Judicial Watch’s disclosure last week carries real weight. According to reporting on the group’s findings, Virginia had initially resisted providing updated removal numbers and appeared to be sitting on the noncitizen removal process altogether as the state entered the pre election quiet period required under its settlement with left leaning advocacy groups. Only after Judicial Watch made the pause a public issue did the Department of Elections move to formally cancel the 6,531 declared noncitizen registrations, finally confirming the removals had, in fact, gone forward.

Conservative commentators have seized on this sequence of events as proof of exactly the kind of institutional resistance to election integrity measures they have long warned about in states where Democratic aligned advocacy groups hold outsized influence over election administration. The argument runs like this: a legitimate, decades old state process for identifying and removing noncitizens from the voter rolls, one rooted in a law signed by a Democratic governor two decades ago, was effectively frozen in the run up to a major election because of a legal settlement extracted by groups more concerned with maximizing registration numbers than with the accuracy of the rolls.

Judicial Watch’s broader track record on this issue lends context to the Virginia disclosure. The organization says its litigation and public records work has contributed to the removal of roughly six million ineligible names from voter rolls nationwide, spanning states including Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky, and jurisdictions like New York City, along with cleanup efforts in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio. Earlier this year, the group also secured a significant legal victory before the Supreme Court, which ruled seven to two in favor of standing for Congressman Mike Bost and two presidential electors who challenged an Illinois ballot counting law, a decision election integrity advocates view as expanding the legal tools available to challenge lax roll maintenance practices in other states.

The Department of Justice has separately signaled it intends to intervene in a Judicial Watch lawsuit against the state of California over allegations that California has failed to maintain accurate voter rolls as required under federal law, and a federal court in Illinois has allowed a related Judicial Watch lawsuit targeting that state’s roll maintenance practices to proceed. Taken together, these cases reflect a coordinated national push, aligned closely with the priorities of the Trump administration’s Justice Department, to force blue and purple states alike to take the accuracy of their voter rolls more seriously.

Virginia’s own numbers add an important data point to that push. Public records previously obtained showed the state had removed 6,303 noncitizens from its rolls between January 2022 and July 2024, meaning the newly disclosed 6,531 figure for the following two year period represents a continuation, and roughly a doubling on an annualized basis, of the pace at which declared noncitizens have been identified and removed since Youngkin’s 2024 executive order took effect.

Still, the core concern raised by Fitton and other election integrity advocates remains unanswered. Virginia’s own data provides no record of whether any of the thousands of noncitizens removed from the rolls actually cast a ballot while still registered. That silence leaves open the uncomfortable possibility that votes were cast by individuals who were not legally entitled to participate in Virginia elections, a possibility that state officials have not moved to investigate or rule out through any public accounting.

Defenders of Virginia’s current process, including the advocacy groups behind the settlement pausing removals before elections, argue that noncitizen voting remains exceedingly rare and that aggressive purge programs create far more risk of disenfranchising legitimately naturalized citizens than they do of catching genuine fraud. They point to the 1,600 individuals nearly removed before the Supreme Court’s 2024 stay as evidence that citizenship verification systems relying on DMV and federal database cross referencing are prone to errors that can sweep up eligible voters alongside actual noncitizens.

Conservatives counter that the solution to imperfect data matching is better data matching, not suspending the entire verification process during the exact window when election integrity scrutiny matters most. They note that a fourteen day window to prove citizenship, as required under Youngkin’s order, is a reasonable and generous accommodation for anyone mistakenly flagged, and that pausing removals altogether for ninety days before a federal election effectively guarantees that any noncitizen registered close to that window will remain eligible to vote in that election regardless of their actual legal status.

The dispute is unlikely to be the last word on the issue in Virginia. With gubernatorial and other statewide elections cycling through the commonwealth on a regular basis, and with the ninety day quiet period settlement now baked into how the state must operate ahead of every future federal election, election integrity advocates say they intend to keep close watch on whether the state resumes aggressive daily verification the moment each quiet period lifts, or whether removals continue to lag as they reportedly did this year until outside pressure from groups like Judicial Watch forced the numbers into the open.

For now, the headline figure stands on its own. More than 6,500 people who told the Virginia government they were not United States citizens were, at some point, registered to vote in the commonwealth. Whatever one’s view of the broader legal fight over quiet periods and purge timing, that basic fact is likely to remain a talking point in Virginia’s ongoing political battles over election administration for the foreseeable future.