Wittman Truth Files #8: Elections & democracy
Wittman voted to support Trump’s January 6th insurrection, then blocked the investigation. Can you trust him to uphold American democracy?
Welcome back to WTF: the Wittman Truth Files. We’ve opened files on affordability, jobs and the economy, healthcare, and several others. Check out the dedicated WTF page for the whole series.
This week we open the file on a key concern for many voters: elections and democracy.
You’ve been told over and over that American elections are rife with fraud: stolen ballots, busloads of non-citizens, rigged machines. It isn’t true. It was never true. Study after study finds that voter fraud is rarer than being struck by lightning.
The real danger to your vote has never been someone sneaking one in. It’s someone with power trying to throw yours out, or preventing you from voting at all.
Time after time, Rob Wittman has supported rejecting and preventing legal, legitimate votes.
He tried to erase lawful votes from an entire state (that wasn’t even Virginia)
In December 2020 Wittman joined more than 120 House Republicans on an amicus brief backing a Texas lawsuit to overturn the presidential results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The Supreme Court threw it out.
Then came January 6. Hours after the mob stirred up by Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to prevent the counting of electoral votes, Congress returned to work. Wittman voted to certify Arizona, but he voted to sustain an objection to Pennsylvania’s votes. In other words, Wittman voted to reject another state’s lawfully certified electors and prevent them from being counted. He was one of 138 House members who tried this; the objection failed (138 to 282). Wittman’s stated reason was “unconstitutional changes” to Pennsylvania’s election, a theory that more than 60 courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, had already rejected. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes were real. Wittman voted to erase them anyway, to keep Donald Trump in power.
Reflect on this: despite the Supreme Court having already rejected the reasons he cited, Rob Wittman tried to invalidate all of Pennsylvania’s’ electoral votes for President.
Four months later, the House took up a bill to create an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the Capitol. It would consist of five members chosen by each party, and was to be modeled on the 9/11 Commission, which was negotiated by a Republican. Thirty-five Republicans supported it. Wittman voted no, the only member of the Hampton Roads delegation to vote against it. He called a five-and-five bipartisan panel “too political.” So he voted to question the count, and also voted to bury the inquiry into the violence of January 6th. Yet he claims to want to uphold election integrity. WTF, Rob?
In January 2025, when Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, including hundreds convicted of assaulting police, Wittman said nothing. He co-sponsored a “Back the Blue” Act, to impose mandatory minimum sentences on people who assault law enforcement officers, but meekly slunk away into the shadows when Trump pardoned criminals convicted of beating Capitol Police officers with flagpoles. Wittman’s hypocrisy is off the charts.
And none of this is ancient history. Rob Wittman’s own record shows what he does when the results are inconvenient: he grasps at straws to find rejected and illegitimate grounds for his actions; he votes to discard another state’s votes; and he votes to keep you from finding out how the January 6 violent insurrection happened. Ask yourself what he will do the next time an election doesn’t go the way his party wants. You know the answer: to hell with election integrity.
The problem they invented, and the “fix” that threatens your vote
Only citizens can vote in federal elections; that isn’t a debate, and no one disagrees with it. (Legal residents can vote in some local elections in certain states – but only if people in those localities approve it and never in federal elections.) Illegal voting has been a federal crime punishable by prison and deportation since 1996. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is not a real crisis, and we have the receipts to prove it.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, keeps a database of “proven” voter fraud going back decades. Out of roughly 1,500 cases, only about 68 involve non-citizens voting. When Utah audited its entire roll of more than two million voters, it found one non-citizen registration and ZERO non-citizen votes. Federal citizenship checks flag just 0.04% of cases, and many of those turn out to be citizens.
Here’s the part that should stop the fearmongering cold. When the Associated Press hunted for fraud across the six battleground states Trump disputed in 2020, it found fewer than 475 possible cases, 0.15% of Biden’s margin, and every specific case it documented was a Trump supporter voting twice or casting a ballot for a dead relative. Most people actually charged with fraud have been Republican voters: residents of The Villages, Florida; men who voted for Trump using a dead spouse’s ballot; an Iowa woman convicted on more than 50 counts to help her Republican husband. Every one of them got caught. This shows that the system isn’t broken – it’s working!
But facts have never stood in the way of Wittman and Trump’s attempts to skew elections in their favor, so they’ve invented the “voter integrity” and “voter ID” problem out of thin air. In April 2025 Wittman voted yes on the SAVE Act, and in February 2026 he joined every voting House Republican to pass its more extreme successor, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, a photo ID to vote, and new hurdles for mail ballots.
Why did they do this? Simple: they’re targeting voters who they fear will not vote for them in a free and fair election. An estimated 21.3 million eligible citizens don’t have ready access to documents like a passport or birth certificate. That includes married women whose IDs no longer match their birth name, rural voters, older Americans, and service members overseas. When Kansas tried a version of this, it blocked roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, 12% of applicants, before a court struck it down. The barrier stopped thousands of legal voters and almost no fraud.
Virginia has already run the experiment, too. In 2024, the state flagged about 1,600 people as suspected non-citizens and purged them from the rolls inside the 90-day window federal law protects, and ended up kicking eligible voters off the list, with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority allowing it to proceed with no explanation. That’s the SAVE Act in miniature, in our own commonwealth: imperfect data, real citizens blocked. Wittman voted to make it national.
On July 16th, Trump pivoted to another strategy to sow doubt about the integrity of federal elections, by claiming that China and “the deep state” interfered in the 2020 election. As Politifact details, his speech was an exercise in disinformation, omitting key context and facts to weave a wholly new, fabricated, and untrue story. And equally important is what he didn’t say because it isn’t true: that voting machines were hacked; that votes were manipulated or changed; that non-citizens voted. The goal of this speech was to stir up support for the SAVE America Act and other measures that will inhibit voting or excuse interference by federal authorities in state-run elections.
Rob Wittman and Donald Trump are not committed to election integrity. They are committed to ensuring partisan advantage, and they spread disinformation and fear in order to create the conditions for manipulating the vote.
Follow the money
Whatever your party, you probably suspect the system runs on money you don’t have. On that, Wittman is a case study.
The detailed 2026 Q2 fundraising data isn’t available at the time we’re writing this article. However, we know that about 21% of Wittman’s campaign money has historically come from the defense and defense-aerospace industries, the sector that ranks #2 among all his donors. Wittman is Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, which means he helps write the checks for the very contractors writing checks to him. Meanwhile, just 1.5% of his money came from small donors giving under $200, where a typical member gets 15 to 20%. Almost no individuals in VA-01 are funding Rob Wittman, but the industries he oversees are.
There was a bill to change this. The Freedom to Vote Act would curb the dark money flooding our elections and end partisan gerrymandering. Wittman opposed that framework, and voted no alongside every House Republican on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored federal protection against discriminatory voting changes. On the actual rigging of districts, when Trump ordered red states like Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri to redraw their maps mid-decade to manufacture Republican seats, Wittman said nothing, while damning Virginia’s own redistricting attempt that was approved by the state’s voters but canceled by the Virginia Supreme Court. His pattern again: strategic silence and turning a blind eye in one instance, but outrage and bluster when his own partisan advantage is threatened.
Wittman voted to make it harder for you to register, and against the one bill that would have made it harder for billionaires to buy election outcomes.
What it costs VA-01
Strip away the “election integrity” branding and the record is consistent: Rob Wittman treats your vote as negotiable when it’s inconvenient, and invents fraud crises to lock in his own party’s electoral advantages. Here’s what that costs you:
If you believe in law and order, your congressman voted to throw out a state’s electoral votes over a theory the courts had already rejected, and then voted to block the investigation into the attack on the Capitol.
If you’re an Independent who wants government to be honest, Wittman is spending the credibility of our elections on a problem that even his own party’s data shows isn’t real.
If you’re a married woman who changed her name, a rural voter, a service member overseas, or a naturalized citizen, the SAVE Act he twice voted for could put your registration at risk while stopping almost no fraud.
If you think the system runs on big money, 1.5% of his campaign came from ordinary donors. The rest came from the industries he’s supposed to be regulating.
The next time Rob Wittman talks about protecting “election integrity,” ask him why he voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electors, why he was the only member of our delegation to vote against investigating January 6, and why the voter ID measures he keeps backing would block citizens from voting for no good reason. You can call his Glen Allen, Yorktown, or DC office, show up at his next mobile office hours, and remind him that in VA-01, the voters have the final say, and intend to keep it that way.
The ninth (and final) Wittman Truth File will be opened next week.
The Wittman Truth Files (WTF) is a weekly series profiling the gap between Rep. Rob Wittman’s public claims and his voting record.
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Here is the list of insurrectionist Republicans,including Rob Wittman, that also voted against investigating the January 6th attempted overthrow of America.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-january-6-insurrection_n_60b134a7e4b0ead279685a40
Wittman’s loyalty to Trump’s power transcends his oath to the American Constitution.