Disinformation Plagued Virginia’s Last Election. Could It Be Worse in 2025?
When Eric Olsen decided to host an open house at the Prince William County election office, he knew he wasn’t going to change everyone’s mind. Olsen — who’s been the registrar for the northern Virginia county since 2021 — has worked in election administration in D.C., Maryland and Virginia for nearly 15 years, and has learned to address a host of voting-related issues in his tenure, from long lines to ensuring polls are ADA accessible.
But it’s only in the past couple of election cycles that he and his team have had to rapidly adapt to address one of the fastest-growing and prevalent threats to U.S. elections: Disinformation.
Since Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, disinformation has quickly evolved to become the biggest threat to elections — and not just in the U.S., but the world. In 2016, it was Russia’s attempt to sow discord through the spread of disinformation to help Trump get elected. In 2020, Trump and his acolytes tried to steal the election from former President Joe Biden with false claims of mass voter fraud, rigged voting machines and bogus legal attempts to overturn the election results.
In 2024, Olsen could sense another disinformation storm brewing. The GOP launched an unprecedented effort to spread the false notion that noncitizens were voting en masse in federal elections, teeing up a narrative to once again claim that the election was stolen from Trump, had he lost. That narrative especially took hold in Virginia, when in early August Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed an executive order to formalize a program to purge alleged noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls.
Given all this, Olsen decided to open up the election office to his community, to quell existing and growing concerns. “I wanted to bring some of those individuals in and help them understand the process better,” he told Democracy Docket. “Either people that know the process and can help explain how it works to other people, or people we definitely knew were skeptical.”
Olsen said that some people “left feeling much better about the process” but it wasn’t all rosy. He recalled getting questions “from a few people that clearly had preconceptions that elections don’t work.”
“I know that some of them changed their minds,” he said. “I can’t say for sure that all of them did.”
When it comes to elections, Virginia isn’t like most other states. It holds off-year state elections, which are often seen as a bellwether for the next federal election cycle. Whatever big issues and narratives emerge as the focal point in the 2026 midterm elections, they’re likely to first sprout during Virginia’s consequential gubernatorial and state elections in November — especially given that Youngkin is term-limited and can’t run for reelection.
Given how prominently disinformation played in Virginia’s federal elections last year, election officials, voting rights advocates and grassroots pro-democracy organizers are bracing for another election rife with right-wing disinformation — and an avalanche of money spent to promote it.
The noncitizen voter myth takes hold in Virginia
In April 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) traveled down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to join the then-Republican presidential candidate for an unusual press conference. The duo talked about the upcoming election and, specifically, concerns about the “integrity” of the voting process.
But, unlike in 2020 when Trump and the GOP were focused on conspiracy theories related to voting machines and ballot drop boxes, this time they focused on something different: the prevalence of noncitizens voting in federal elections at an alarming rate. Johnson said that “if only 1 out of 100 [noncitizens] voted” that could lead to hundreds of thousands of noncitizens voting, which “could turn an election.”
He then announced that Republicans in Congress would be introducing a nationwide proof of citizenship bill that, among other things, would “require states to remove noncitizens from their existing voter rolls.” The bill, known as the SAVE Act, would come to dominant GOP talking points for the remainder of the election cycle.
And it had a profoundly chilling effect. All over the country, right-wing groups and state political leaders parroted these talking points, using them as a spring board to push for mass voter purges. Virginia was no exception.
In August, Youngkin issued an executive order that implemented a program requiring county election officials to remove any suspected noncitizens flagged by the state. The order claimed that state election officials had identified and removed more than 6,000 alleged noncitizens illegally registered to vote throughout Virginia. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — along with several private organizations — sued, alleging that the program violated the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and actually resulted in more 1,600 citizens being illegally removed from the state’s voter rolls.
“Obviously that was part of a trend of talking points that we see being spewed by certain people,” said Joan Porte, the president of the Virginia chapter of the League of Women Voters — one of the private groups that sued Youngkin over the voter purge program. “What we found is that a lot of those people were naturalized citizens”
The case went on to become a legal lightning rod in the weeks leading up to the November election: a federal judge blocked Youngkin’s voter purge program, but the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it just days before the election. Eventually, Trump’s DOJ voluntarily dismissed the case completely, leaving it to the private groups who first sued to determine how they want to proceed.
Porte’s group is still litigating against Youngkin’s voter purge program, despite the fact that they don’t have the DOJ attached to the case anymore. For Porte and the League of Women Voters, the effort they spent last year fighting disinformation greatly affected what their normal outreach and advocacy efforts would be in a normal election year.
“We had to spend a ton of money last year on the people who suddenly found themselves disenfranchised,” she said. “We spent close to $10,000 extra dollars just trying to inform people that you may go into the polls and you may find that you’re not registered to vote. And what does that do to someone who comes from an authoritarian country?”
Fears of more disinformation in November
With Youngkin term-limited from running for reelection, all eyes will be on Virginia in 2025. Though the Old Dominion was seen as a fairly blue state throughout most of the 2000s, that started to shift with Youngkin’s election in 2021, which caused Democrats to lose trifecta control of the state government.
That trajectory continued in the 2024 election with former Vice President Kamala Harris losing some of the ground that Biden had in the 2020 election, leaving many to wonder if the state is starting to turn purple. That’ll be put to the test in November, when former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) faces off against whoever wins the Republican primary election in June — likely current Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R).
And voting rights advocates and grassroots organizers are preparing for a full-court disinformation blitz.
Because Virginia has some of the loosest campaign finance laws in the country — there’s nearly no limit on what candidates can do with campaign cash, and very light restrictions on how much money an individual can contribute to a candidate. “Virginia has no campaign finance laws,” Porte said. “We are known as the Wild West.”
Because of that, groups like the League of Women Voters are bracing themselves to fight the avalanche of money from right-wing groups and people that they fear will be used to spread even more disinformation about noncitizen voting and other issues.
“I think you’re going to see untold amounts of unaccounted money in Virginia pouring in in this election. There are no boundaries, there are no rules,” she said. “With our ridiculous campaign finance laws, I think we’re going to be playing whack-a-mole to try to stop disinformation.”
It’s still early in Virginia’s election season, but there’s already an outpouring of money coming into the race. Spanberger has already raised a whopping $9.5 million for her campaign, while Earle-Sears, the GOP frontrunner, has already raised more than $2.5 million. But a quarter million of Earle-Sears’ war chest comes from a controversial source: Elizabeth Uihlein, one-half of the billionaire Republican megadonor couple who have a long history of funding election denialism and disinformation — especially in state and local elections.
“My worry is all the money that will come in, all the disinformation that [Elon] Musk and these bullies will be able to do and with access to our information,” Katherine White, co-founder of the grassroots organizing and advocacy group Network NOVA, told Democracy Docket. “They can really hyper target people with more disinformation. And the disinformation is to get people to do certain things or distrust the system by pointing to a problem that doesn’t exist, that isn’t factual.”
In Prince William County, Olsen is currently taking advantage of what he says is the calm before the next election storm. He’s not sure if this upcoming election will be plagued by noncitizen voting disinformation, or something else.
“We’re kind of waiting for what the next big thing is right now,” Olsen said. “I think, at least for us, some of the misinformation, disinformation has tampered down a little bit. Because we have elections every year, we tend to be a little ahead of the curve on that.”
But Virginia is hardly unique in terms of how disinformation impacts elections. Despite all the pivoting that the League of Women Voters had to do in Virginia last year to address Youngkin’s voter purge efforts, Porte knows that people like her in every state are recalibrating their efforts to address the needs of the moment.
“We have people who are prone to weaponize misinformation and that is happening across many states,” she said. “I don’t think Virginia is any different from some other states where this is happening. But I do think it’s going to be a full court press for us this November.”