West Virginia will not accept voter registrations collected by Biden Administration

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WBOY) — West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner (R) said Wednesday that the state will not accept applications “illegally gathered by Federal agents.”

At issue is an Executive Order signed by President Joe Biden in March of 2021 , but in a press release, Warner said it was just last week that the country’s chief election officials were told on a call with the White House that it’s implementing voter registration policies.

Mississippi’s Secretary of State Michael Watson wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday that he “had the chance to ask a White House official about the plans submitted by each agency to carry out the illegal executive order” but was told, “those plans are not public, and they never intended for them to be public.”

Biden’s Executive Order includes changes such as directing the Attorney General to facilitate voter registration for all eligible people in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the United States Marshals Service to facilitate voting by mail for inmates.

“These efforts are not only an intrusion into state matters but are a misuse of federal revenue to register potentially ineligible felons and/or illegal immigrants,” Watson wrote in his op-ed.

In his press release, Warner raised multiple sections of the United States Constitution that he believes the Executive Order violates, including the 10th Amendment, which reserved all powers not expressly given to the Federal Government in the Constitution to the states and Article 1 Section 4, which says the times, places, and manner of holding elections shall be left to the state legislatures.

“West Virginia will emphatically not give up our State’s duty to register voters in a nonpartisan manner to the Federal Government, nor will we accept voter registration forms collected by Federal agents. White House overtaking of State responsibilities is something we will fight all the way to the Supreme Court,” Warner said in the release.

Further, Warner said that the White House did not consult with state election officials while developing plans to implement the Executive Order, nor did it explain why federal resources are being used to enact these plans so close to the 2024 Presidential Election.

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