EPEC NEWS

From the EPEC Team Newsletter:

Virginia’s April 21 Special Election on redistricting is far from settled — even before the Virginia Supreme Court takes up legal challenges to the vote after a Tazewell County Judge ruled that the referendum itself is unconstitutional and void.

The unofficial numbers from the election itself have not been settling in either.

As of Saturday, April 25th, the “yes” votes for whether to allow Assembly Democrats to redraw congressional seats from 6-5 (D-R) to 10-1 (D-R) had increased by a few percentage points to 51.6% of the vote (1.59 million).

The “no” votes in the tally have now decreased by a few percentage points to 48.39% of the vote (1.49 million).

This aligns with data we are tracking that shows early voting totals much lower in the final tallies, according to unofficial data from the Department of Elections.

Compare to results posted Wed. April 22nd:

It may all be moot if the Supreme Court of Virginia agrees with a Tazewell Circuit Court judge who ruled Wednesday that the whole thing was illegal, unconstitutional and void. See the ruling here.

The ballot question itself (whether to “restore fairness” to help Democrats gerrymander a map that wipes out four Republican-held congressional seats) is also on the docket.

Tazewell Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley ruled the question itself violated the Submission Clause of the Virginia Constitution because “the ballot language proposed in HB 1384 submits to voters a flagrantly misleading question ot the voters, and because the ballot language did not accurately describe the proposed amendment as it was passed by the General Assembly.”

It is among the legal challenges before the Supreme Court of Virginia Monday.

We also see confusion in the way the results are being tallied — more so than the usual small differences we have observed in past years between early voting and final results during Virginia elections.

Jon Lareau, who volunteers as EPEC’s Executive Director and CTO, has been tracking the Department of Elections’ summary data results and running the numbers. (They can be viewed in a “JSON” file format, available at the bottom of its “stats” page under “media export.”)

He tallied up all of the results from each of the voting precincts across Virginia’s 133 localities — then compared that number with just locality-level results in the data.

He sees about a 67,364-ballot difference in the “yes” votes and a 26,930-ballot difference in the “no” votes when we add up the results by Precincts vs. Localities.

Confusing Results & Other Anomalies

The 70,000 vote variance we saw for Chesterfield’s tallies that EPEC Senior Analyst Rick Naigle discovered this week has been corrected.

We are told that someone loaded election results twice and apparently did not catch the error until groups began pointing it out.

(Your humble correspondent appeared on the Warroom Podcast Friday to explain the issues in the election data. See the segment here.)

This was a rushed Special Election; and the data quality throughout Early Voting as well as the many variances in the election night tallies shows it.

EPEC Team’s analysis of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from general registrars, logged by Board member Chris Rohland, shows that General Registrars across the Commonwealth were in a very short time-frame for the start of early voting on March 6th. The assembly ignored the 90-day notice that the constitution requires for this kind of referendum.

Here are some samples of issues that EPEC Team analysts documented throughout the 45-day early voting period:

• Ballot receipt dates of 2022 during the 2026 Special Election.
• Early in-person ballots recorded after the early voting period ended (600).
• Ballot counts decreasing without explanation.
• Ballots not going through scanners properly (Suffolk County).
• Problems with pollbooks not working or going down during voting.
• Ballot-scanning machines (known as DS-300s or DS-200s) not showing a proper zero count when voting begins or resumes. (The zero count is critical to ensuring how many ballots are counted each day, in addition to the ongoing count.)
• Mystery voters showing up on the Comprehensive Absentee Application List (CAAL) with no ID match in the Registered Voter List.
• Lareau documented 6,109 “approved” records on the CAAL list of permanent absentee applications with no existing record in the RVL, the official list of voter registrations for the Commonwealth. See his analysis here.
• Naigle observed ballot data showing a date-stamp of November, 2025.This suggests the locality did not conduct Logic & Accuracy testing on its machines prior to the start of early voting in March.
• Naigle also saw ballots processed with dates outside of voting times.
• He found an 11-point difference in the rejection rates of presumed R vs. presumed D ballots (based on light modeling and primary election voting history). His analysis showed it was not random.

• Using statewide data, he found that lean-R ballots show a higher probability (statistically significant) of their ballots being rejected into “unmarked” status. See the report here and the differences depending on mail-ballot volumes.

Back to Legal Challenges

The sloppy nature of the April 21 Constitutional referendum election data itself may not be the main factor before the Supreme Court of Virginia when it hears oral arguments from Republican assembly members Monday.

But the General Assembly’s failure to observer the 90-day statute before Early Voting started is. It would be fair to call the sloppy data quality with the Special Election that we observed a symptom of Assembly Democrats’ rush to re-draw congressional maps before the midterm elections.

“There is no question that this resolution shredded state law and tradition,” wrote Constitutional scholar and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley on his blog:

“The question is whether the justices themselves have the courage to demand more from the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Former Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli believes the Republican challengers have a strong case.

“There are four clear violations of the state constitution here,” he told the Washington Times. Democrat Attorney General Jay Jones (and the outside legal team he brought in for the appeal) would have to “win on all four to make this stick,” he added.

“I don’t think they can.”

Cuccinelli laid out the four key challenges in an X post:

He wrote:

The passage [of the referendum bill] was invalid. The amendment was taken up during a special session convened in 2024 for budget purposes. The General Assembly’s own call to the Governor (under Art. IV, §6 and Art. V, §5) and its governing resolution (HJR 6001) limited the session’s scope. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment on redistricting required a two-thirds vote that never occurred. A Tazewell County judge found this action “void, ab initio.”

Art. XII, §1 requires that after first passage, a proposed amendment be “referred to the General Assembly at its first regular session held after the next general election of members of the House of Delegates.” An election must intervene between first and second passage. Here, first passage occurred during an election cycle — not before an intervening one.

Art. XII, §1 requires the amendment be submitted to voters “not sooner than ninety days after final passage by the General Assembly.” The timeline from second passage to the April 21 vote did not satisfy this requirement.

The fourth hurdle? The maps themselves:

Art. II, §6 requires that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” The proposed congressional maps violate this contiguity requirement (rather badly).

Arguments are slated for 9:00 AM Monday, April 27th. Observers say the full court will likely convene. Live audio stream is here:

https://www.courts.state.va.us/courts/scv/dockets/scv_oral_session_livestream

UPDATE: Playback of the audio from the hearing is here.

Once more, The Maps:

Summary of ballot types:

See how your locality voted (in the unofficial results) in our interactive map here:

https://epec.info/virginia-2026-special-election-page/