The recalcitrant Republican that the Virginia Board of Elections has been trying to get removed from the Waynesboro Electoral Board has taken care of the issue by removing himself.
Curtis Lilly, the board’s chair, who filed a lawsuit in Waynesboro Circuit Court last fall because he didn’t want to have to certify the 2024 election, citing his lack of knowledge of how voting machines work, resigned his board seat on Wednesday.
The Virginia Board of Elections had voted 5-0 on Jan. 15 to petition Waynesboro Circuit Court for the removal of Lilly “for failure to discharge his duties under Virginia law.”
Lilly was serving a term with an end date in 2026.
State law gives the local Republican Party chair, Jim Wood, the former vice mayor who was foiled in his bid to ascend to the mayoral post when his side came up short in the 2024 elections, the authority to nominate a replacement for Lilly, and for Scott Mares, the vice chairman who joined Lilly in the frivolous certification lawsuit last year.
The circuit court would then have to approve the nominees from Wood.
The same court ordered Lilly and Mares to certify the results of the 2024 election in a ruling handed down on the eve of the election.
ICYMI
- One of the Waynesboro vote lawsuit guys … broke into a voting machine on Election Day?
- Waynesboro: Judge orders Republican electoral board members to certify 2024 election
The court order from Judge Paul A. Dryer came at the end of a legal review of the suit in which Lilly claimed that he “cannot ensure that the machines do not connect to the internet, allowing for vote counting algorithm manipulation, nor can I ensure with any certainty that the electronic ballot scanners are presenting results which are consistent with the contents of the ballot box.”
“I have taken an oath to uphold the Virginia Constitution, which prohibits the secret canvassing of ballots. As such, I believe that certifying the 2024 election would be a violation of the Virginia Constitution,” Lilly wrote in an affidavit attached to the suit, making the case that the local electoral board should be able to hand count ballots.
Lilly and Mares obeyed the court order, but with clenched teeth: the city’s director of elections, Lisa Jeffers, presented the Virginia Department of Elections with copies of the signed vote-count abstracts from the Waynesboro Electoral Board where the two wrote beside their names “certified but objected to” and “certified but with objections.”
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Chris Graham
