City of Alexandria Stonewalling Investigation Into Illegally Registered Voters

The city of Alexandria, Va., is stonewalling an investigation into voter rolls in the city that could have illegally registered voters.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indiana-based law firm that litigates to protect election integrity, filed a lawsuit in April against the city of Alexandria on behalf of the Virginia Voters Alliance, a group dedicated to improving election laws. The groups contended that voter rolls in Alexandria have for years contained more registrants than people of voting age in the city.

In January, PILF sent a statutory notice letter to Anna J. Leider, the general registrar of Alexandria, warning that the city was in violation of federal voter registration laws. Leider did not use data readily available to the city’s circuit court clerk to remove ineligible voters from the rolls, PILF claimed.

PILF asked for information that included registration data in the city, the number of voters who were purged as part of list maintenance, the number of notices the city sent to inactive voters, the number of voters removed from rolls due to criminal conviction, and the latest available numbers of registered voters.

Leider did not provide the information and refused to meet with the group to discuss the matter, prompting the lawsuit. However, Leider reversed course after the suit was filed and allowed the Virginia Voters Alliance to enter the city’s office to inspect the voter registration records.

While inspecting the records, the group discovered a list of several hundred registrants who had been removed from the voter rolls because they were not U.S. citizens, said Hans von Spokavsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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