Arlington Electoral Board members on Oct. 1 voted to keep Virginia’s attorney general in the loop related to allegations of non-citizen voting.
The panel in August had voted 3-0 to turn over relevant information both to Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) and Arlington Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D). But shortly after that vote, Electoral Board secretary Kim Phillip asked to rescind the planned notification of Miyares.
Phillip, the body’s lone Democrat, believes state law does not allow local electoral boards to refer allegations of potential criminality directly to the attorney general. That led to a relatively rare case of a partisan split and a 2-1 vote.
At the Oct. 1 meeting when the matter was resurrected, Republican Electoral Board members Richard Samp and Dominick Schirripa said the body did have the authority, and the responsibility, to at least alert Miyares.
The action will result in simply “letting the attorney general know,” Schirripa said, rather than serving as a formal referral to his office. What Miyares does with the information is up to him, Schirripa said.
Discussion and the vote came after Electoral Board members and top staff huddled in a closed session for 25 minutes, presumably related to the notification matter. While Phillip voted against doing so, as board secretary she will draft the letter informing Miyares and send it on behalf of all three members.
August’s initial decision to alert Miyares and Dehghani-Tafti came after a national advocacy group released findings suggesting that 57 people who did not hold U.S. citizenship had been on the voter rolls in Arlington. More than a dozen of them had cast ballots, according to the data provided to election officials.
Whether those votes were willful violations of state law limiting voting to U.S. citizens, as opposed to paperwork errors, is not something the county elections office can determine on its own. “We have no way of knowing one way or another,” Samp said.
Even if there were random cases of wrongdoing, “we’re not suggesting this is a rampant problem,” Samp said.
Dehghani-Tafti’s office has been in communication with local election officials on the matter, election officials said, but due to the nature of the investigation largely has been tight-lipped about any details.
Both the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office and Arlington County have released statements in recent weeks touting a focus on election security ahead of the Nov. 5 general election.
The issue of non-citizen voting is not limited to Arlington. In mid-September, Fairfax County director of elections Eric Spicer alerted both Miyares and that county’s commonwealth’s attorney, Steve Descano (D), to “possible unlawful elections conduct” by those who had been removed from voter rolls after being identified by the Virginia Department of Elections as non-citizens.
Nearly 1,000 people were removed from voter rolls in Fairfax County between January 2022 and July 2024, Fairfax election officials said, although the number casting ballots was likely far smaller.
Also at the Oct. 1 meeting, Arlington Electoral Board members appointed another 89 officers of election, who will go into the pool of prospects that will be called on to staff the county’s 54 polling places on Election Day.
While around 750 will be needed countywide, election officials say the number of those who have been approved to serve is more than enough to handle the busiest year of the four-year election cycle.
