As Election Day gets closer, voters have been out at the polls voting early — with more than 30 million Americans already casting their ballots before Nov. 5.
According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, about 12.5 million of those ballots were cast in person and around 16.5 million were mailed in.
When it comes to early voting, Democrats have outperformed Republicans with showing up to polls ahead of Election Day, especially in Virginia.
GOP voting numbers are strongly outpacing previous years and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said that it has been a “primary effort” to tell Republicans to vote early.
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice filed a suit against Virginia, accusing the commonwealth of violating a federal law that says you can’t do large purges of voter rolls within 90 days of the presidential election.
On Friday, a judge ordered Virginia to reinstate hundreds of registered voters to the rolls. This comes after Youngkin’s executive order that had Department of Elections and Department of Motor Vehicles update voter registration rolls to be more frequent in early August.
Once introduced, these voter registration rolls removed people that identified as noncitizens on forms, even sometimes mistakenly removing voters.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares released his own statement following the ruling, calling the decision politically motivated.
In his statement, Miyares said “it should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,”and that “today a Court – urged by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice – ordered Virginia to put the names of non-citizens back on the voter rolls, mere days before a presidential election. The Department of Justice pulled this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging a Virginia process signed into law 18 years ago by a Democrat governor and approved by the Department of Justice in 2006.”
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