by WorldTribune Staff, October 3, 2016
More than 1,000 non-citizens in eight Virginia localities have voted in recent elections in the key swing state and the Democrat governor is reportedly stonewalling an investigation that could uncover an even larger election fraud problem.
“One thousand votes or so is enough to swing a close election in the state,” a report by the Virginia Voters Alliance said. “In 2013, the Democratic candidate for attorney general won by fewer than 1,000 votes.”
The 1,046 people who voted illegally may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to the alliance’s report, which is based on findings from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Foundation general counsel Christian Adams said the watchdog group’s effort to expand its investigation met resistance from Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat and long-time friend of Hillary Clinton, who told a staffer to advise officials in other Virginia localities to ignore the group’s requests for information.
While it is a felony for non-citizens to vote in Virginia, no proof of citizenship is required when voters register.
“In some cases, aliens and permanent residents will register to vote and either admit on the form they are not citizens, or they will mislead,” the report said. “Local officials can check each voter later by matching data from the Virginia driver’s license bureaus, where the aliens in question are usually likely not to mislead authorities on their status.”
The Virginia Voters Alliance looked into the issue first in the city of Alexandria. The alliance noticed that the Northern Virginia city had more people registered to vote than eligible voters who lived there, the report said.
The problem of non-citizens is likely worse than what the alliance found in eight Virginia localities.
“The problem is most certainly exponentially worse because we have no data regarding aliens on the registration rolls for the other 125 Virginia localities,” the report reads. “Even in this small sample, when the voting history of this small sample of alien registrants is examined, nearly 200 verified ballots were cast before they were removed from the rolls. Each one of them is likely a felony.”
Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating potential voter fraud in Virginia after it was revealed that 19 dead people had recently been registered to vote by a Democratic operative.
Andrew Spieles, a student at James Madison University, confessed to re-registering the deceased Virginians to vote in the 2016 election cycle, according to the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record.
The 19 applications of deceased citizens were submitted by Spieles through an organization called HarrisonburgVOTES.
HarrisonburgVOTES was founded by Joseph Fitzgerald who is currently chairman of the Sixth Congressional District Democratic Committee in Virginia and is the former mayor of Harrisonburg.
Fitzgerald told reporters that his organization had no knowledge of Spieles’s actions and fired him immediately after his confession.
“He’s smart, and he understands the [political] process,” Fitzgerald told the Daily News-Record of Spieles. “Who the hell knows what his motivations were?”