The pattern. County by county.
https://voterintegrityproject.com/media-loses-minds-over-election-integrity/
VA Election Official Caught Packing Precincts
May 16, 2023
May 11, 2023 — Political warfare broke out in Buckingham County, VA, last week when their county’s Registrar, Lindsey Taylor, resigned after being caught packing precincts with more Democrat employees and not allowing any of the remedies listed under Virginia Code 24.2-115, when a party Chairperson objects to the proposed staffing list.
The statute requires each precinct to tolerate a partisan imbalance of “no more than one person,” but Buckingham GOP Chair, Ramona Christian, found her county’s partisan mix to be 54 Independents, 17 Republicans and 12 Democrats.
Virginia has party affiliations, so in order for Christian to learn the partisan leanings of each applicant, she had to pull their individual voting records and see which ballot they requested during a party primary election.
When Registrars cannot find enough potential workers from either party, they may substitute “Independent” employees into the mix, but that solution is only allowed if both party chairs are given notice ten days before the election and are allowed “the opportunity to provide additional nominations.” By the way, the law only allows one third of precinct workers to be “citizens who do not represent any political party.”
Christian approached Taylor within the specified time limits and offered four remediation options, but Registrar Taylor rejected all of them and held the elections with the illegal staffing ratios in place.
Amazingly, in what NBC, called a “conservative rural” county, during Virginia’s “red wave” 2022 election, the Democrat School Board candidate in Michelle Ford, managed to win. . . by nine votes.
Republicans wanted answers.
When Things Got Ugly
Under Virginia law, the party of the Governor gets a majority of the Election Board (“EB”) members, meaning one Democrat was about to be replace by a Republican in around 130 voting jurisdictions. During Christian’s applicant screening interview, she checked for any conflicts of interest in case they needed to not renew the incumbent Registrar’s contract.
After the election, the two GOP EB members submitted a long list of complaints about the previous year’s elections, tempers flared. Among their charges, three issues were most serious…
Not enough Republican poll workers (a majority were unaffiliated with either party, which violated a “parity law” in Virginia
Ballots that arrived at the registrar’s office late
Suspicious absentee ballots that merited further analysis.
That was when somebody launched a full-scale media attack in defense of Taylor. On April 10, 2023, a NBC posted a breathless hit piece that featured the Left’s favorite story line, “baseless voter fraud allegations.”
To buttress their “baseless” claim, they carefully quoted local Commonwealth Attorney, Kemper Beasley III, who told the “news” reporter that he found no evidence of criminal election fraud. This is not surprising, since there are no criminal penalties for breaking the parity law.
Shortly after the first NBC story posted, Taylor learned her contract was not being renewed, so she resigned. Two part-time employees quit at the same time. Her Deputy Registrar had resigned a month earlier, so staff experience was at an all-time low. This turnover fed the news cycle and they coined a new smear against advocates of electoral transparency: Election denialism.
