A conservative watchdog group announced Monday that it will train volunteers to monitor polling places on Election Day throughout Virginia, where hundreds of non-citizens have been shown to be on the voter rolls.

Judicial Watch Election Integrity Project leader Robert Popper, a former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, will take charge of the project.

“Judicial Watch will monitor voting places in Virginia to expose and deter any voter fraud.”

“Judicial Watch will monitor voting places in Virginia to expose and deter any voter fraud,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a prepared statement.

Judicial Watch launched the poll-watching effort in response to a report last month by the Public Interest Legal Foundation exposing flaws in the state’s voter registration system. The group counted 1,046 non-citizens registered to vote in just eight counties. That could mean 6,500 non-citizens registered statewide if other counties have the same rate of false registrations.

In the eight counties that provided the legal group with lists of immigrants that had been removed from the voter rolls, 31 ineligible voters cast a total of 186 ballots from 2005 to 2015, according to the report. The most immigrant votes occurred in 2012, with the second-most coming in 2008.

The group’s founder, J. Christian Adams, told LifeZette on Monday that he has no reason to believe the eight counties his organization examined are outliers.

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“I think they’d be worse in other counties,” he said, pointing that elections officials in Democratic-leaning Arlington and Manassas have refused to provide the Public Interest Legal Foundation with the information it has requested.

The foundation said that the statewide numbers probably are large enough to change the outcomes of close elections.

“It may have already done so in the Virginia attorney general’s race,” Adams said, referring to Democrat Mark Herring’s razor-thin victory in 2013 over Republican state senator Mark Obenshain.

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The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which provides a lists of voters who are registered in more than one of the 26 states participating in the program, found in 2013 that 57,923 Virginia voters were registered in at least one other state.

The FBI and local police said last month that they are investigating how at least 19 people managed to re-register to vote in Virginia despite a seemingly insurmountable handicap — they are dead.

“Judicial Watch election monitors will be neutral and silent observers at select polling places in Virginia,” Popper said in a statement. “We do not oppose or endorse candidates for public office. Our election monitoring in Virginia is wholly independent of any party or candidate.”

Adams attributed the lack of attention to making sure that voter registration rolls are accurate to laziness, in some cases. But he said it also is important to ask who benefits from illegal voters. He noted that the Service Employees International Union recently sought to intervene in a lawsuit attempting to force North Carolina officials to clean up the voter rolls.

“Why does the SEIU care?” he asked.

Adams praised Judicial Watch for its poll watching initiative.

“Obviously, having transparency in the process is a good thing,” he said.

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Judicial Watch’s efforts come at a time when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been sounding the alarm about potential fraud. Republican voters have expressed concerns, as well. A Politico/Morning Consult poll last week found 73 percent of Republicans think the election could be stolen from Trump. Only about one-third of Republicans expressed a great deal or quite a bit of confidence that votes on Election Day will be counted fairly, according a recent survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

And a Washington Post survey found that 60 percent of GOP voters believe that illegal immigrants vote. And 43 percent believe that people vote using the names of dead people.

Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project, launched in 2012, has put several state and county officials on notice when they violate federal laws requiring them to clean up voter rolls. The organization also has defended photo identification laws, which have been under systematic attack in the courts.

Judicial Watch asked Virginia residents interested in serving as poll watchers to contact Eric Lee at [email protected].