By: Stephanie Kalota
Founder, Veteran Legislative Voice & AHG Correspondent
It all started when former President Donald Trump, who is also currently running as the Republican Presidential Candidate, was interviewed by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait. He was asked, “Should Google be broken up?” Trump replied, “I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes, and the Justice Department sued them.” You can view the full Bloomberg interview here.
This stirred more attention to something already progressing for this upcoming election. Former President Trump was referring to the Justice Department filing a suit against the state of Virginia for violating a federal law prohibition on removing voters within 90 days of an election, otherwise called the Quiet Period Provision. This was in response to Republican Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin’s executive order that was signed on August 7th.
This executive order was to ensure that there were no non-citizens on the registered voters’ list so that personnel flagged in a cross-reference from the State Department of Motor Vehicles would have 14 days to prove their citizenship. This led U.S. citizens to believe that their voter registration was canceled less than 90 days before the general election, which is specifically against the Quiet Period Provision of the NVRA. Virginia hasn’t been the only place that this occurred, this has also happened in Alabama, with similar results. Among these actions, Republican House Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida has even introduced a bill “that will allow states to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls at any time.” The frustrating part is that these actions fuel the conspiracy that there are issues with non-citizens voting in the general election, while this is not actually what is truly going on. For more reference, please check out this article.
But this isn’t the only thing that is screwing up the voting for the upcoming general election. Recently, suits have been filed in PA, Michigan, and North Carolina to challenge overseas votes, something that many military families often use when it comes to elections. Per ABC News, “In both suits, the [Republican National Committee] officials allege that the state’s election officials have not created a secure system to verify that an overseas voter is an American and have specifically called out provisions in their election laws that permit spouses or dependents of military or overseas voters to vote in elections based on the residency of the military or overseas voter. “As a result, certain people who have never resided in Michigan (or perhaps anywhere else in this country) are registering to vote and voting in Michigan elections,” the plaintiffs in the Michigan case claim in their filing.
This isn’t coming only from the Republican National Committee alone, former President Trump has “claimed without evidence that anyone living overseas can get a ballot mailed to them, even if they are not eligible to vote, falsely accusing Democrats of subverting a 1986 law to win in November.” So why is he targeting the military? From the 2016 exit polls (from the New York Times) to the 2020 election polls by the Military Times and Syracuse University, Trump lost almost 10 points. Within the same 2020 Military Times Survey, 50% of the active-duty military answered that they had an unfavorable or very unfavorable view of President Trump. So by the political pundits, it is assumed that former President Trump is trying to target those ballots that would be a vote against him.
