The city of Alexandria, Va., is stonewalling an investigation into voter rolls in the city that could have illegally registered voters.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indiana-based law firm that litigates to protect election integrity, filed a lawsuit in April against the city of Alexandria on behalf of the Virginia Voters Alliance, a group dedicated to improving election laws. The groups contended that voter rolls in Alexandria have for years contained more registrants than people of voting age in the city.

In January, PILF sent a statutory notice letter to Anna J. Leider, the general registrar of Alexandria, warning that the city was in violation of federal voter registration laws. Leider did not use data readily available to the city’s circuit court clerk to remove ineligible voters from the rolls, PILF claimed.

PILF asked for information that included registration data in the city, the number of voters who were purged as part of list maintenance, the number of notices the city sent to inactive voters, the number of voters removed from rolls due to criminal conviction, and the latest available numbers of registered voters.

Leider did not provide the information and refused to meet with the group to discuss the matter, prompting the lawsuit. However, Leider reversed course after the suit was filed and allowed the Virginia Voters Alliance to enter the city’s office to inspect the voter registration records.

While inspecting the records, the group discovered a list of several hundred registrants who had been removed from the voter rolls because they were not U.S. citizens, said Hans von Spokavsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Leider refused the Alliance's request to copy that document. The state election board told Leider that she could not release that information, according to accounts of what her attorney had told the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

"The Alliance was not able to determine exactly how many of those non-citizens had illegally voted before being dropped from the voter list," Von Spakovsky said. "In a letter to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the city’s attorney subsequently claimed that the voter history of non-citizens who are removed from the voter rolls is not subject to the public records inspection provision of the NVRA. In other words, they are trying to hide whether non-citizens illegally voted."

J. Christian Adams, president of PILF, added that no foreigners have faced prosecution after being caught on voter rolls.

"It’s become clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of foreigners have been on Virginia voting rolls and voting in federal elections," Adams told the Washington Free Beacon. "Some have been caught only because they renewed their drivers’ license and told the truth during the renewal that they were non-citizens. Not a single one of these felonies have been prosecuted by the Justice Department. That’s because voter fraud is the sort of thing this administration laughs at instead of takes seriously. Noncitizen registration and voting is a critical vulnerability in our election system."

Leider told the Free Beacon that when the Alliance came to inspect the records they made all but one category of records available for copying.

"There was some uncertainty about whether specific information in that one category of records needed to be redacted before copying," Leider said. "I believe the issue has been resolved."

Adams said that is not yet the case. "When we have the docs, it will be resolved," he countered.