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One of the Waynesboro vote lawsuit guys broke into a voting machine on Election Day

Chris Graham
waynesboro
(© Gary L Hider – stock.adobe.com)

One of the two Republicans on the Waynesboro Electoral Board who sued the state because he didn’t want to certify the election seems to have broken into one of our election machines in Ward A on Election Day.

Can’t make this stuff up, folks.

This eyebrow-raising tale is among the disturbing revelations in a letter from the city’s director of elections, Lisa Jeffers, sent to the Virginia Board of Elections on Dec. 10.


Read the letter


Scott Mares, the local electoral board’s now-former vice chair, is our alleged culprit here.

According to Jeffers’ letter, she had gotten a call at 8:45 a.m. on Election Day reporting a paper/ballot jam at the Ward A precinct, and she made the quick drive over to the location to assess the situation.

“Upon arriving, the Chief Officer, Election Officials and the voter were standing by the machine,” Jeffers wrote.

“I was shocked to see the Vice-Chairman standing at the side of the machine with the Chief’s set of voting machine keys in his hand, and he had opened several components on top of the scanner. None of which would have cleared a paper jam,” Jeffers reported.

Wow, right?

But this one is just the most shocking of the issues included in a memo to the state electoral board prepared for the board’s Jan. 15 meeting, at which the state board voted 5-0 to petition Waynesboro Circuit Court for the removal of Curtis Lilly, the chair of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, “for failure to discharge his duties under Virginia law.”

Lilly, who is serving a term on the electoral board through 2026, and Mares, whose term on the board expired on Dec. 31 – which is why the state elections board isn’t seeking his removal – filed suit in October to pre-emptively challenge the Nov. 5 vote count.


ICYMI


The duo asserted in their legal filing that they “believe that the voting machine is counting the votes in secret because neither the program counting the votes recorded on the ballots nor the ballots themselves can be examined.”

Lilly, in an affidavit attached the suit, further 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 the affidavit, making the case that the local electoral board should be able to hand count ballots.

Which, OK, fine, but then, we had Mares there on Election Day, keys in hand, after tampering with the guts of a voting machine.

Nothing happened to him that day, incidentally; Jeffers, in her letter to the state board, said she had the voter whose ballot had jammed in the machine run it through a second time, “and the machine worked properly.”

We’ll have to take her word on that, unfortunately.

Gotta note here that we literally had these two MAGA Republicans filing a lawsuit asking for permission to not to have to certify the election because they said they didn’t trust the voting machines, and now we’re learning that one of the guys literally broke into one of our voting machines on Election Day.

If you want to know why I signed onto the suit that ultimately got a local judge to force these guys to do their job, now you know.

voter abstract
Photo: TownHall.Virginia.gov

Other issues reported by Jeffers included allegations that Lilly and Mares tried to circumvent public-records requests made by members of the public under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, that they regularly blew off scheduled electoral board meetings, improper unsealing of unused ballots during a vote canvass “in contradiction to the established practice of gaining ELECT and court approval prior to unsealing such election materials,” and then, the topper, their trite approach to following a judicial order to certify the local election results.

“In signing the abstracts, the Chairman and Vice Chairman wrote beside their names ‘certified but objected to’ and ‘certified but with objections,’” the staff memo to the Virginia Board of Elections noted.

Maybe they objected because they know that somebody broke into one of the voting machines in Ward A on Election Day …

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].