A video on the 2022 Augusta County Courthouse referendum posted online by James Burnett, an Augusta County resident and Iraq War veteran, is drawing tons of traffic on his YouTube channel – and heat for Burnett, because of the political direction in which his fingers are pointed.
“Your local government did not like the outcome of a 2016 election, so they rigged a new election using the law and the mechanisms of the government and dishonest practices to trick you and to force you essentially into voting for something that you didn’t want to begin with,” Burnett said in the video.
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And by “your local government,” he’s referring directly to the seven-member Augusta County Board of Supervisors – the seven-Republican-member Augusta County Board of Supervisors.
This isn’t me, Chris Graham, former local Democratic Party chair, saying, the MAGAs running Augusta County did you wrong, which I do, often, because the MAGAs running Augusta County so often do you wrong.
This is the guy who spearheaded the local SAW Patriots movement that got folks riled up over making Augusta County a Second Amendment sanctuary, as red as red can be, saying, 67 percent of the county had already voted in a referendum in 2016 against building a new county courthouse, and the local Republicans didn’t listen.
Where Burnett is getting pushback from local Republicans is where he brings this up against the backdrop of the hue and cry from the Rs about the April 21 referendum over congressional redistricting.
Sixth District Congressman Ben Cline has launched what he terms a “grassroots” movement to defeat the redistricting referendum, entirely to save his job, but he’s using the language of doing it to protect the sanctity of a previous referendum, in 2020, in which state voters approved nonpartisan redistricting.
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Burnett’s take on the April 21 referendum:
“The Republicans claim the current referendum language is misleading while at the same time they lobbied to remove the ‘no’ options from the ballots in 2022? Hypocrites!” Burnett told me by email.
We traded a good number of emails yesterday; I was trying to figure out why he is bringing up the 2022 referendum now, three and a half years later – literally as the county is beginning the construction work on the new courthouse in Verona.
County leaders had a ceremony to formally lay the cornerstone for the courthouse on Monday, as thousands of people were clicking to watch Burnett’s video, in which he laid his case.
Gotta tell you, though, if Burnett had laid out the particulars as to the issues with the conduct of the referendum back in the fall of 2022, we’d have had something.
Boiling it down, the writ formally calling the election, dated Aug. 11, 2022, and signed by Augusta County Circuit Court Judge W. Chapman Goodwin, delineated that:
“The Question on the ballot regarding the Augusta County Courthouse to take the sense of the qualified voters of Augusta County shall take the following format:
“Under Virginia law, Augusta County must provide an adequate court facility for the Augusta County Courts. To accomplish that purpose:
“Shall the county courthouse be relocated to Augusta County at a cost of $80,026,447?
“or …”
“Shall the county courthouse remain in the City of Staunton at a cost of $103,855,525?”
Seems straightforward.
The problem is how the court order lays out the “manner of ascertaining the vote.”
Goodwin’s writ requires that “yes” and “no” votes be counted for both options, which isn’t possible, because voters weren’t given the option of voting “no” on either option.
As Burnett and I traded emails on Tuesday, he shared with me audio that he recorded of a conversation he’d had with an official in the registrar’s office on Election Day in 2022, in which he brought up the issue of not being able to cast a “no” vote.
Burnett, who said he didn’t cast a vote either way on the referendum question, since there was no option for a “no” vote, was told that because he didn’t cast a vote either way, he would be counted as an undervote, not a “no” vote, and then, when he brought up the matter of there not being an option to cast a “no” vote on either question, he was told, “we’re taking care of that with the Department of Elections,” and “we’ll take care of that after the election.”
Now, here in 2026, three and a half years later, there’s no recourse for a legal remedy.
Burnett, in his video, makes the case that “somebody committed an actual crime” here, which is a bit much, because who committed the crime? Was it Chapman, the judge, for writing a confusing court order; the county attorney at the time, James Benkhala, who signed off on the court order, and didn’t seem to recognize the obvious discrepancy between the referendum questions to be asked, and the method proscribed for counting the votes?
I wouldn’t throw the book at the vote-counters.
At this stage, I wouldn’t throw the book at anybody, but Burnett told me he has reached out to Tim Martin, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, to ask him to conduct an investigation.
I don’t have faith that Tim Martin is the independent arbiter that Burnett assumes an independently elected Commonwealth’s Attorney should be.
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Martin seems to view his job as top county prosecutor along the lines of how Pam Bondi views her job as Attorney General for the Trump regime – that of being the legal muscle there to protect the interests of the powers-that-be.
As much as I am loathe to defend Tim Martin for anything, there’s no crime here; the remedy would have had to have come during the intervening period between the issuance of the court order on Aug. 11, 2022, and the Nov. 8, 2022, Election Day, and the remedy would have been a simple cleanup of the directions on how the votes were to be counted and tallied.
Nothing here is going to stop construction on the courthouse; nobody is going to go to jail.
But that doesn’t seem to be the ultimate point that James Burnett is raising here.
“I’m about as ‘red’ as the came. Not anymore,” Burnett told me. “Now I just stand for freedom as our forefathers saw it. Minimal government. Minimal laws. Leave people alone and let them live the lives they want, and anyone that gets in the way of that is a tyrant.”
Hey, sympathetic ear here. James Burnett is the 2A sanctuary guy-turned-leave me alone; your humble writer here, Chris Graham, is the former Democratic Party chair who gets hate mail from Democrats because I go public with my frustrations over how our side is disconnected with the working class.
Burnett tells me he’s getting heat from the Rs because, similarly, he’s not a team player, for pointing out the obvious – that local Republicans fixed a 2022 referendum to get the result they wanted through confusing language in the court order setting out the terms of an election, and are now crying foul because they claim Democrats are doing the same thing with the redistricting referendum.
I mean, he’s not wrong, on either side of that.
Video: James Burnett on the 2022 referendum
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