VIRGINIA, USA — Election Day is only a week away in Virginia. The Youngkin administration just admitted it made a huge mistake. The Department of Elections wrongly purged thousands of voters from its rolls.
“I cast a ballot, they just never counted my ballot,” Galen Baughman said.
In 2021, Baughman finally got the right to vote. He was one of the more than 100,000 former felons reinstated on the voting rolls since 2014.
“Every single election since I had my right restored, I voted,” he said “Except for the one where I was stricken from record.”
In June, Baughman showed up to vote and he was told he wasn’t on the rolls. He was confused.
“The governor restored my rights and I was good unless I committed a crime,” he said. “Here I was trying to use my voice as a citizen I was told I was not counted.”
Galen turned to Fairfax County Senator Scott Surovell to help figre out what happened.
“He only had probation violations since his rights were restored -- it made no sense to me,” Surovell said.
After weeks of back and forth with Richmond, Surovell discovered the problem. He explained that when Virginia’s voter registration database looked at the state police felony records, it counted technical violations, like a probation violation, as a felony. Then the database purged the voter from the registry.
According to Surovell it was a software issue.
“No one sort of looked at this very carefully before they instituted this new software program to make automatic decisions for people’s constitutional rights,” Surovell said.
It wasn’t just Galen who was impacted. Around 3,400 other voters got purged. The Youngkin administration recognized the error with a little over a week to go before the next election
In a news release they said they had reinstated the wrongfully purged voters, including Baughman.
All he can think about is next Tuesday.
“I like showing up and exercising my voice, so I’ll be there and I'll be voting in my precinct,” he said. “I look forward to wearing another ‘I Voted’ sticker.”
The Virginia Democratic Congressional Caucus also sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking for an investigation into the matter.