RICHMOND — Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Tuesday rolled out a web portal aimed at encouraging Republicans to register for absentee ballots and vote early in this fall’s legislative elections, embracing many of the voter-access policies enacted by Democrats in the past few years.
“Virginia is a toss-up state and this isn’t going to be easy,” Matthew Moran, executive director of Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia political action committee, said Tuesday in a briefing with reporters. But the historic level of turnover in this year’s legislative races, with more than a third of the House and Senate featuring open-seat contests with no incumbent, “makes this unlike anything we’ve ever seen in Virginia before and really gives us optimism.”
The name of the web portal — “Secure Your Vote Virginia” — echoes security concerns raised by Republican lawmakers as they sought to roll back elements of voter access laws passed when Democrats controlled both chambers of the General Assembly and the governor’s mansion in 2020 and 2021.
Those laws included establishing early voting beginning 45 days before an election, either in-person or by mail, and absentee ballots that can be mailed or dropped off at ballot collection boxes. Though Democrats often pointed out that the voting provisions worked out well for Youngkin as he and Republicans swept statewide races two years ago, GOP lawmakers have argued that the steps make votes vulnerable to fraud.
In this year’s legislative session, the Republican-controlled House of Delegates passed — on party-line votes — measures to eliminate ballot drop boxes and limit early voting to two weeks before an election. Both measures died in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“While we applaud any encouragement of civic engagement, we reject the GOP’s hypocrisy in pushing early voting measures all while they have actively worked to make voting more difficult,” the House Democratic Caucus said in a written statement.
“The hypocrisy is glaring,” Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Mamie E. Locke (D-Hampton) said in a news release.
The portal, which Youngkin announced Tuesday morning on Fox News, features simple buttons to click for step-by-step assistance in requesting an absentee ballot or voting early in person.
Democrats nationwide have tended to use early voting tools more than Republicans, leading to election nights in which in-person vote totals appear to favor GOP candidates until early ballots are counted, causing a Democratic surge.
Republican officials around Virginia and the country have used that phenomenon to raise questions about election integrity. Now that Youngkin’s team is embracing early voting, they will use voices “that people trust and listen to” to make sure dubious conservative voters “understand the need for us to adapt,” said Dave Rexrode, chairman of Spirit of Virginia and political adviser to Youngkin. GOP elected officials took to Twitter on Tuesday to spread the word that early and absentee voting is now a good thing.
To run the early voting operation, Youngkin’s PAC has hired Brian Barrett, who oversaw a successful, similar vote effort last year in Georgia for the reelection of Gov. Brian Kemp (R).
“Brian Kemp showed the path for Republicans in Georgia last year. Now we’re able to scale and build on it here,” Moran said — adding that Virginia, in turn, will serve as a proving ground for GOP technology in next year’s races nationwide.
The effort includes extensive and repeated polling in some 18 battleground races where both parties hope to pick up seats and control each chamber of the legislature, Rexrode said. Data from those surveys and from past voting patterns will be fed into a constantly updated artificial intelligence engine to guide campaigns on which voters to target and how to woo them.
Democrats are also building a coordinated campaign to protect their control of the Senate and flip the House, but they have not rolled out details. A state party spokesman on Tuesday declined to comment on Youngkin’s plans, saying Democrats have long used data crunching to focus campaign efforts.
All 140 seats in the legislature are on this year’s ballot in Virginia. Youngkin is raising historic amounts of money to try to take control of the General Assembly and enact his priorities, such as tax cuts and limiting abortion to 15 weeks of pregnancy. He has also flirted with running for the Republican nomination for president, and securing the legislature would be an important part of establishing his national profile.
Youngkin’s team is focusing the election map on a handful of swing districts in purple suburbs of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads. On Saturday, an army of some 100 canvassers will begin hitting 18 key areas to knock on doors, ask for votes and generate data to plug into the computer models.
“Your vote matters and we’re going to need engagement from everyone interested in moving Virginia forward to be successful,” Youngkin, who also encouraged supporters to vote early in 2021 during his run for governor, said in a news release. “We can’t go into Election Day down thousands of votes … . We fundamentally believe Secure Your Vote Virginia is how, together, we can win in 2023 and beyond.”
He is launching the web portal in partnership with the Republican Party of Virginia, the Republican State Leadership Committee, the state Senate Republican Caucus and the House Republican Campaign Committee.
In the news release, RSLC President Dee Duncan praised Youngkin for “strong leadership to bring this data-driven absentee and early voting effort together and make it a model for the country to follow.”