Here’s what the Good-McGuire recount looked like in Lynchburg

I spent Thursday watching democracy in action.

Thankfully, it was kind of boring.

I spent the day — and by “the day,” I mean from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. — in a courtroom in Lynchburg, watching that city’s recount of the 5th District Republican primary between Bob Good and John McGuire.

To say this had been a contentious contest is to understate things. This may have been one of the most vicious primary battles I’d ever seen in all my years of following Virginia politics. One of the deputies assigned to the courtroom confided he was worried that viciousness would spill over into the courtroom for the recount.

It did not.

I saw no tension whatsoever. Throughout the day, the official representatives of the Good and McGuire campaigns were not just civil to one another, they seemed downright friendly. At one point, they were even comparing notes on good books they were reading. A Good representative was reading “His Excellency,” a biography of George Washington by Joseph Ellis. A McGuire representative was reading “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” account of the 1972 presidential campaign. Republicans often like to bash the media (and sometimes there are things worth bashing), but those of us gathered in Lynchburg got along well. I ended up swapping some election stories with a McGuire rep, while a Good rep and I compared notes on where we like to see live theater.

At the end of the day, there were no disputed ballots, only very minor disputes over how the recount law should be interpreted, and not many votes changed. The electoral board did not announce a result, saying that should be left to the recount court sitting in Goochland County, but Veronica Bratton, chair of the Lynchburg Republican Party who was an official observer, kept a running tally through the day. She calculated that Good picked up two votes from what the June 18 primary had recorded while McGure picked up one. (Late Thursday night, the recount court confirmed McGuire’s win over Good; the final tally was just four votes different from what was reported after the primary. See the story by Cardinal’s Markus Schmidt.)

For those who may have lost faith in our electoral process, all this should be reassuring, even if you’re not particularly happy with the outcome.

The sound of this recount was not people arguing back and forth. It was the soft mechanical whir of the ballots going through the optical scanners more than 5,000 times, which later gave way to the sound of papers being shuffled as some ballots were hand counted, and then eventually the screech of masking tape being pulled off the roll so that the ballots could be sealed up again.

Here’s what I saw:

At 7:26 a.m., four minutes ahead of schedule, the news media representatives who had been credentialed by the recount court were allowed into the courtroom. Lynchburg Circuit Court Clerk Todd Swisher swore in 16 election workers, who vowed to be on guard against “fraud, deceit and abuse.” They were divided into three teams of two apiece, with the others designated as alternates in case they were needed. These are many of the same election workers you see working the polls on election day. Keep in mind that electoral boards are not massive government operations; they rely on ordinary people willing to give up a day of their time for very modest pay but long hours to make sure elections work. I heard many of these election workers mention how they’d taken a day off from their regular jobs so they could work the recount.

Arrayed before them in the courtroom were five optical scanners, each of which had been designated for a particular purpose. Two were labeled as “election day” ballots, one for early voting in-person ballots, one for mail-in ballots and one for provisional ballots. Photography was not allowed in the courtroom, but to my eye the machines looked like suitcases set on top of big black garbage cans. The suitcase part opened up to reveal a touchscreen computer and a slit where the ballots were to be fed in. From there, they fell into the bottom — so the garbage can comparison isn’t far off.

In front of where a judge would normally sit was a big cage on wheels, full of big manila envelopes — the ballots for each precinct, each one sealed by tape. Before we arrived, deputies had wheeled it in from the clerk’s office, where ballots are typically stored for years after an election.

Registar Daniel Pense explained how things would work, and at about 8 a.m., the election workers started unlocking the machines and starting them up. The official observers for each campaign were asked to inspect each machine and verify the “zero count,” an initial test to show each machine was set at zero.

Then, at 8:12 a.m., the recounting began, with election workers unsealing those envelopes and feeding the ballots one by one into the optical scanners. Virginia law specifies that recounts involve putting the ballots through the machines again — and not a hand count, except in certain circumstances (which later came up). Studies have repeatedly found that optical scanners are more accurate than hand counts, but some still prefer an old-fashioned hand count. Shortly after the primary, Good had called for a hand count, but that’s not what the law allows.

One by one, the computer screens flashed “Please insert paper ballot,” then “Processing ballot page” and finally “Ballot page counted successfully. Thank you for voting.”

Every now and then the screen would flash “invalid.” The election worker would then take that ballot, inspect it and show it to the campaign observers. In most cases, the machine had rejected the ballot because the voter hadn’t marked a choice in the congressional race but had voted in one of the other races on the ballot — the Republican Senate primary or, in Ward IV, a city council primary. Those are called “undervotes.” In one case, someone hadn’t marked anything. There were also a few cases where the machines rejected a ballot because it was from the Democratic primary. Pense said that election workers are supposed to separate those on election night but in some cases, there had been mix-ups. We must remember that anytime people are involved, there will be some amount of human error, however innocent and unintentional.

Observers — including the media — were instructed only to speak to the electoral board members (two of the three were present, the third was on vacation), so I didn’t get a chance to interview the election workers. I was mostly stationed behind one whose name tag said “Emma.” Every so often through the morning, she’d call out, “Ok, here’s another,” and the campaign observers would gather around to verify that there was no choice marked in the congressional race.

When each precinct was finished, election workers got down on their knees, or sat on the floor, to empty each bin of ballots and seal the ballots back up. Campaign observers then peered into each machine to make sure all the ballots had been collected.

At 9:27 a.m., election workers encountered their first problem. Precinct 305 had recorded 869 ballots (not necessarily votes, but ballots) on Election Day but the machine had only counted 868 ballots in the recount. One ballot was missing. (A word lesson here: In the recount, “ballot” referred to the piece of paper, “vote” referred to what the voter had marked.)

“You’ll have to go through the Democratic ballots,” said electoral board chair David Levy, so two election workers were dispatched to sort through the ballots from the Democrats’ congressional primary on the theory that the missing Republican ballot had inadvertently gotten mixed in with those.

“Found it, first one,” an election worker announced, and the processing resumed.

This happened several times throughout the day.

At 10:54 a.m., I saw Levy, fellow electoral board member Betty Gibbs and Pense huddling. In time, Levy came to the railing separating the counting from media representatives and announced that one precinct had seen its vote tally change. “Bob Good lost a vote in the count and John McGuire picked up a vote and we don’t know why,” he said. He then said the election officials had decided to run that precinct through the machines again.

That’s when I remembered something I’d read in the state code when I’d been researching Virginia’s recount law: “There shall be only one recount of the vote in each precinct.” The state code goes on to say “the result calculated for ballots accepted by the ballot scanner machine during the recount shall be considered correct for those machine-readable ballots unless the court finds sufficient cause to rule otherwise.” In other words, the recount tallies are taken as official even if they differ from the Election Day result — unless there’s an apparent difference in the total number of ballots cast. Here, there was no change in the number of ballots cast or even the total number of votes cast — one had just changed.

When I questioned Levy about this, he sat down to look up the code section — he carried with him a thick gray book entitled “Virginia Election Law.” After a few minutes, I heard him mutter: “Oh, dear.” He then went off to confer with the other election officials. By then, the McGuire representative had found the same code section that I remembered. (The campaign observers were allowed to have phones so they could communicate with their respective campaigns; we mere scribes had to keep our phones locked in our cars.)

I was right about what the code said: It doesn’t matter if the result changes; whatever the tally says in the recount is accepted as the true one. There is no second recount.

If it were writing the law, I’d have the law say that if the recount differed from the original count, there should be a second recount to figure out which one was right, but nobody asked me. I just know if I’m doing math and wind up with two different results, I do the computation a third time.

If you’re wondering how a vote can “change,” it’s because not even machines are perfect — and different machines are sensitive at different levels when it comes to reading the ovals that voters have filled in. Not every voter inks it in perfectly. I heard stories about voters who insist on writing in a check mark instead of filling in the oval — some machines read that as a vote, some don’t. (There are rules as to how much of the oval must be filled in.) It’s easy to imagine how a machine might misinterpret such a mark — reading it one way on Election Day and another in the recount (especially when the recount might be using a different machine than the one that was in that precinct on Election Day). “I’m always questioning the optical scanners,” Bratton told me.

About 11:35 a.m., another issue came up. The overall result in the early voting had remained the same but one precinct had recorded an “extra” vote for Good while another had recorded an “extra” vote for McGuire. Those votes canceled out but it was, well, odd that two different precincts had changed. This prompted the most serious legal dispute of the day, although it was handled so quietly I didn’t find out about it until later.

Levy said election workers would hand count those early voting ballots, citing the portion of the state code that says if the total number of ballots cast is in dispute, election workers are allowed a hand count to address the discrepancy. The McGuire representative, a lawyer from Loudoun County, argued that state code referred only to the “total number” of ballots. In this case, the total number of ballots overall didn’t change — the code made no reference to changes at the precinct level. Levy thought otherwise so a hand count was ordered.

It’s worth pointing out here how electoral boards in Virginia work. Each locality has one, composed of three members — two from the governor’s party, one from the other party. Since we have a Republican governor, Republicans now have a 2-1 margin on electoral boards. Levy is the sole Democrat on the Lynchburg electoral board, and those Republicans have made him its chair. Through the day, I saw him making sure to talk to the Republican representatives to keep them apprised of what was happening, and he seemed always to err on the side of caution — opting for more counting rather than less (such as the case where I pointed out to him that state code didn’t allow a second recount). The Republicans I talked with Thursday gave him high marks for his handling of the recount — and the electoral board in general.

At 11:55 a.m., the last ballot was fed through the machine and it was announced that we’d now have an hour-long break for lunch. Because the machines and ballots were still present, the courtroom was ordered cleared. The election workers and other officials involved in the recount had lunch courtesy of the Good campaign — that was one of the requirements of the court’s recount order. Because the June 18 margin was outside the margin that called for the state to pay for the recount (but within the margin that still allowed a recount), Good had to pay for the recount, and that included lunch. That lunch was a boxed lunch from The Honey Baked Ham Company and, by all accounts, it was delicious. There was no free lunch for journalists, though, so I spent my lunch hour contributing to the local economy at the Market at Main restaurant a few blocks away.

When we returned at 1 p.m., election workers spent more than an hour filling out paperwork — they had to verify the results for each precinct. I was able to take a look at one of the forms they had to fill out: It involved documenting the serial number of the machine and the number of its seal, as well as verifying that each one had been set to zero before the counting began.

There was then a long conference between Levy and the other election officials. He then announced there would be five different hand counts. Both the early voting ballots and the Election Day ballots in precincts 102 and 404 would be hand counted. It was in those early voting ballots where two votes had changed — one extra for Good and one extra for McGuire. Meanwhile, the machine recount in each of those precincts had one less ballot than the Election Day count had, thus necessitating a hand count. Also, the mail-in vote tally in precinct 401 was one less ballot during the recount than it had been during the Election Day count.

When there was a discrepancy in the number of ballots, the first thing election workers did was look through the Democratic ballots to see if they could find a miscategorized Republican ballot. Because all the early votes are collected into a single central absentee precinct (but have marks on them indicating what precinct the vote should be assigned to), that meant election workers would have to go through hundreds of ballots again to find it. By now, the voting machines had been packed up, resealed and wheeled away, so some of the election workers sat down on the courtroom floor to sort through all the early voting ballots, setting aside their misplaced Republican finds in two plastic baskets, red for one precinct, yellow for another. Eventually they found them all — except one. The “missing” ballot in the 401 mail-in votes couldn’t be found. Eventually we found out why: It never existed.

The first hand recount of the mail-in votes in precinct 401 still showed one less ballot than recorded on Election Day. The election workers made a second hand recount and this time they found the missing ballot: Two ballots had been stuck together so firmly they’d missed it the first time through.

The election workers who weren’t sitting on the floor sorting through the early voting ballots gathered around the table where normally attorneys would sit, and set about hand counting the Election Day ballots (and, in time, the early voting ballots).

This was a tedious process, made easier by doing each count in sets of 10, with one worker calling out the vote and another writing it down.

When we broke for lunch at noon, we thought the afternoon would go quickly. It did not. Counting ballots by hand takes a lot of time. Not until 5:12 p.m. did things appear to be done. The hand count upheld the machine recount of the early votes but found the machine recount of the Election Day voting had missed a ballot in each precinct.

For those who expect perfection, this is a troublesome thing. “I know it’s a little thing,” Bratton said, but this involved a small number of ballots being counted. “What about when we have a presidential election?”

On the other hand, elections involve two things that aren’t perfect: people and machines. For those who want to focus on the big picture, the vote tally in Lynchburg changed only by two votes, nowhere close to changing any outcome.

At 5:45 p.m., Levy called the election workers together. “OK, people, the recount is done. Thank you very much.” They cheered. Kurt Deimer, one of the election workers, came over to chat. Even if recounts don’t change the outcome, they’re worth doing if a campaign wants one because they ought to reassure voters that the process is accurate. That’s why he was there. “I’m not doing this for the money,” he said.

Two final tasks remained. Deputies wheeled the cage full of ballots back to the clerk’s office. Meanwhile, the official results from the recount were deposited in a bright red pouch labeled “Transfer Container.” Swisher, the court clerk, and Pense, the registrar, then went out and got into a sheriff’s deputy car to be escorted to Goochland — the bright red pouch tucked between them in the back seat.

In this week’s West of the Capital . . .

I write a weekly political newsletter that goes out Fridays at 3 p.m. In this week’s edition of West of the Capital I look at:

• What next for Rep. Bob Good after losing the recount?
• A political theory on why cannabis stores are flourishing in the most conservative part of the state. (See the reporting that Cardinal’s Susan Cameron did on cannabis this week, plus my column about how I bought marijuana over the counter in Abingdon and Marion).
• An unusual data point that suggests Virginia is no longer a Southern state.
• A former presidential candidate was at the JD Vance rally in Radford. Can you guess which one?

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