Opinion | Virginia’s election fraud team is a concession to ‘big lie’ conspiracy

Mr. Miyares never embraced the falsehood that President Biden owes his victory to ballot-box cheating. That was a refreshing contrast to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who dabbled in the “big lie,” although he clearly knew better — and pivoted once he won the GOP nomination to acknowledge that Mr. Biden was the legitimate president.

Nonetheless, the attorney general framed his new Election Integrity Unit as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to “increase transparency and strengthen confidence in our state elections.” In fact, he does the opposite. By creating a task force to investigate a fantasy offense, he deepens the conviction of fantasists that the offense must therefore exist — otherwise, why would the state’s most senior law enforcement official muster such resources to investigate it?

Even as Mr. Miyares pursues election fraud poltergeists, his office has downgraded its focus on litigation involving civil rights, human trafficking, housing discrimination and wrongful convictions. Attorneys handling those issues, among others, were among some 30 whom he fired as he took office in January.

What’s more, knowingly or not, Mr. Miyares used racially loaded language in unveiling the initiative, which he said would be dedicated to upholding “legality and purity” in elections. As The Post reported last year, in covering the debate over legislation in Texas that would restrict voting, the word “purity,” in electoral and other contexts, has a long and inglorious history in Southern politics and discourse, and was often wielded in the Jim Crow era as a racial dog whistle. “Appeals to ‘purity of the ballot,’ ” wrote The Post’s Hannah Knowles, “helped deprive Black Texans of their right to vote around the turn of the 20th century,” according to Gregg Cantrell, a history professor at Texas Christian University. In turn-of-the-century Alabama, racist Dixiecrats pressed for “white supremacy and pure elections” in pressing for voting laws that would impede Black people’s access to the ballot, as historian Michael Perman has documented.

The myth of voting fraud is a tangle from which Republicans will not easily escape. In Richmond, GOP lawmakers fervently opposed Democratic-sponsored legislation designed to make voting easier. Republicans warned darkly of fraud, but under those same laws, both Mr. Youngkin and Mr. Miyares won high-turnout elections in which they had both been regarded as underdogs. Despite those victories, as the Virginia Mercury reported, Republican legislators this year tried to repeal many of those same ballot-access laws, an effort blocked by Democrats who control the state Senate.

At best, Mr. Miyares’s new election fraud unit is window dressing, a sop to his party’s conspiracy-addled base. Here’s hoping the 20 employees assigned to the task have other, legitimate work that keeps them busy.