Elections officials ready for Thursday’s 5th District GOP primary recount

At 7:30 a.m. Thursday, election officials will gather in courtrooms across all 24 localities in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District to recount the votes in one of the most watched and expensive primary battles nationwide this year.

Among them is Daniel Pense, the general registrar in Lynchburg, who will lead a team of 10 colleagues, including six primary officials and four alternates. They are tasked with recounting about 7,500 ballots originally cast on June 18 in the GOP nomination contest that incumbent Rep. Bob Good, R-Farmville, lost to state Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland County, by a mere 374 votes out of 62,792 cast.

“Maybe if everything goes perfectly, we will be done before noon,” Pense, in a hopeful tone, said in a recent phone interview. “But if something happens, if there is a question or a problem, everything kind of stops until we’ll get more direction. That’s why we are planning to make a full day of it, and if it goes smoothly, then great. If anything comes up, then people are going to be waiting until we’ll get the right answers.”

Good’s campaign filed a petition for the recount two days before the July 12 deadline and eight days after the election was certified by the State Board of Elections. The chairman of the powerful House Freedom Caucus told supporters in an email that he was seeking a “complete recount,” including a hand-count and paper ballot match to the reported machine results.

Good’s petition at the Goochland County Circuit Court — McGuire’s home locality — set in motion a complex array of actions by officials from the Department of Elections, local election officers and the state’s judicial system.

Following Virginia election law, Bernard Goodwyn, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, appointed a three-panel recount court, consisting of Goochland’s Chief Judge Claude Worrell, Judge Christopher Clemens of Salem and Judge Christopher Papile of Newport News.

After a brief preliminary hearing two weeks ago, which Good attended, Worrell formalized his recount order on July 23, leaving election officials just nine days to put their operations in place.

According to the order, all participating localities were required to program their voting machines ahead of the recount to return or set aside ballots with overvotes, undervotes or write-ins. These set-aside ballots, as well as any ballots not accepted by the scanner, will be hand-counted. The recount teams will also hand-count any ballot that was hand-counted on Election Day.

In Lynchburg — a location that will be watched closely by Good’s campaign after the congressman hinted at irregularities relating to ballot drop-boxes in the days following the primary election — officials are set to move their ballots and tabulators from an undisclosed safe storage location to courtroom B at the local circuit court on Wednesday, followed by a test run later in the day, Pense said.

“The ballots are to be taken out into the courtroom one location at a time and run through machines to basically replicate what went on on Election Day,” he said. The list of election workers assigned to the task was finalized last week, as required by the court order, Pense said.

“Under the code, you have to use election officials who were there on Election Day. We have given some recommendations to the court of who we think would probably be the best people to serve. The Good campaign came back and selected their own observers out of our list of candidates, so there’s going to be a subset of those who we recommended. That’s how the plan looks right now.”

Under Virginia law, the localities involved cover the cost of a recount when the margin of victory is 0.5% or less, or if the candidate who petitioned for the recount is declared the winner. But because McGuire led the incumbent by 0.6%, Good had to raise money to pay for the recount. Worrell, the judge presiding over the recount, said at the hearing earlier this month that the total cost will amount to an estimated $96,500.

The initial order released by the court diverted slightly from how localities usually run their elections, but an amended order that followed shortly after complied “a little bit more with what normally the Department of Elections would do,” Pense said, referring to the way some election data is being reported to the state agency.

“The department has a specific way with how they like to report elections, not just by the [ballot] count but by different data like early voting or absentee [ballots], so those are different chunks of votes streaming in,” Pense said. “The department kind of wants us to report this in the same way, because the technology is there for that. That’s the marching orders that we are supposed to follow.”

On regular election days, the department’s website reports the results in real time as they come in. But in the case of Thursday’s recount, “results will be reported on ELECT’s website once all locality results are certified by the court,” said Andrea Gaines, a spokeswoman for the Department of Elections.

Pense said that his office has been communicating with the circuit court clerk over the past few weeks about logistics, “who’s going to be where, where are we going to hold this, what facilitation do we need. Then we lined up everything equipment wise and people wise for the day of the recount and for the day of testing.”

As state and local officials and the court got to work behind the scenes, Good fired off a flurry of posts on his social media accounts questioning McGuire’s attempt at pushing back against the recount.

“Why did the McGuire Campaign send two lawyers to the preliminary recount hearing last week, and seek to have it dismissed?” Good wrote on Facebook on July 23, referring to a motion by McGuire’s attorney Caleb Acker, an associate in Holtzman Vogel’s litigation and compliance practices, that Worell denied.

“Why would John McGuire try to prevent a recount that is provided under state law, and entirely funded by the Good campaign? Why is John McGuire against confirming the accuracy of the election?”

Good returned to Facebook the next day, questioning the sincerity of his opponent’s interest in fair elections.

“John McGuire attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ rallies following the 2020 election, and hosted viewings of the ‘2,000 Mules’ movie [a documentary that claims widespread, coordinated voter fraud] last year. Why is John McGuire no longer interested in ensuring election integrity and the security of drop boxes in the 5th District?”

Sean Brown, a spokesman for McGuire’s campaign, said in a text message that Good is entitled to call for a recount, “no matter how frivolous it may be,” and is required to pay for it by law.

“We expect a fair and open process that will reaffirm John McGuire’s victory over Bob Good. Bob has yet to demonstrate that he has raised enough money to cover the cost of this recount. We certainly hope he doesn’t plan on leaving the localities holding the bill for it.”

A spokeswoman for Good’s campaign did not respond to text messages and emails seeking comment Tuesday.

Under Virginia law, each party to the recount is entitled to have one observer per recount team. The observer may stand behind or sit to the outside of the recount officials as they work and may only watch and take notes.

David Richards, a politics professor at the University of Lynchburg, said that a recount in a district as large as the 5th is an enormous undertaking.

“The district encompasses 24 cities, counties and parts of counties in central Virginia, from Hollymead north of Charlottesville down to the state line south of Danville, including Lynchburg and as far west as Chatham. There are a lot of localities involved, and of course, each one has multiple precincts,” he said.

While modern technology will “help speed things up,” it will likely take all day to do the recount — if nothing goes wrong, Richards added.

“That said, I don’t think we will see a significant change in numbers. Perhaps an extra vote here or there, but nothing to change the outcome,” Richards said. “If we do see wild shifts in the totals, that will open up a new can of worms as localities will have to explain why the numbers have changed. That in turn may prompt new questions about the race. But I don’t really expect to see that scenario.”

Just south of Lynchburg, in Campbell County, General Registrar Kelly Martin and her team will tally about 6,000 ballots in courtroom D of the local circuit court, using the same tabulation scanner that they used during the election.

“We had training beforehand, and we are going to test the machines the day before, and some other localities have already tested theirs,” Martin said. “We are a larger locality than Lynchburg, so I’m hoping by early afternoon we will be done.”

Pense, Martin’s colleague in Lynchburg, expects that his effort could drag out longer if his recount team fails to agree on the validity of any ballot. In that case, such a ballot would be challenged and handed to the recount court for adjudication. The order doesn’t spell out how the judges would validate contested ballots.

“Any ballots that don’t read correctly or kick back fall into that contested group, and when we’re done the sheriff’s deputy assigned to do this will need to put them in his vehicle, keep them secure and take them to Goochland,” Pense said.

The so-called result tapes from the tabulators will also be sent to the recount court for review, Pense added.

“Once we’ve finished running the ballots through, we will punch a button and the tabulator does its thing and it spits out the tapes,” he said. “We’ll take the copies that are supposed to go to the court and we’ll probably print a copy for ourselves so we’ll have that. The whole goal of appointing several officials is so we can run ballots simultaneously, and we can finish it sooner rather than later.”

Once the recount is completed, the recount court will certify the total results. If the recount changes the result of the election, the winner of the recount will be issued a certificate of election.

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