Last week was a great example of the media bias in Election Integrity. A big story was not reported and a non-story was promoted. First, what should have been big news:
“[Virginia Department of Elections’] examined its data sharing relationship with the Virginia Department of Health. After ELECT requested a review of all VDH death records going back to 1960, VDH discovered death records that had not been previously shared with ELECT. After additional data analysis by ELECT staff, 18,990 records of registered voters were identified and will be sent to local registrars for processing in the coming week. As a result of these findings and process improvements, citizens can expect to see a significant number of names removed from Virginia’s voter rolls.
As a few conservative outlets like RedState, who reported on this, concluded:
The change seems especially important, given a major Department of Elections confession. Apparently, administrators haven’t been sticklers for accuracy. . . .
It would certainly be nice if only those who are alive could vote. Perhaps it would lessen concerns that American voting is in a state south of perfect integrity.
Eight years of Democrat control of the state were in part at fault as Democrat Election Administrators generally don’t focus on clean election rolls, despite even President Obama’s Commission on Election Administration that stated:
“Bloated and inaccurate voter registration lists — the source of many downstream election administration problems — arise in the absence of a national list of voters that is updated when voters move, die or change their names.”
Of course, the National Media completely ignored the 19,000 dead people removed from Virginia's voting rolls, instead focusing on the Democrats’ false narrative of “election deniers” intimidating election officials including in Virginia even after the 2022 election occurring without intimidation of election officials.
And while their doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to convince the public there’s a widespread conspiracy of Trump supporters threatening local election officials. Within the past several weeks, NBC News and The New York Times have run exposés highlighting election officials in Virginia and Texas, respectively, who recently resigned amid confrontations with fellow Republican officials.
The Biden DOJ expanded the Voting Rights Section and created a task force to address these threats. The result was:
So, to recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation. On top of that, only five individuals had been charged with any type of crime as of the DOJ’s August 2022 press release.
As the Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood concludes:
The second reason is to discourage conservatives with legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for instance, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.” And of course, Democrats went ballistic, parroting the same “threat to democracy” talking point.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans actually welcome transparency in the electoral process. The attempt by legacy media and leftist politicos to spin a false narrative about conservatives threatening election workers on a grand scale is an attempt to avoid accountability at the ballot box and cast their political opponents as enemies of democracy. It’s a strategy steeped in falsehoods and smears, which for Democrats is nothing new.
The real story in Virginia on election administration right now is the voting rolls finally being cleaned up.