A hearing has been set in the court case that will determine whether the Nov. 5 vote in Waynesboro will be counted.
The two Republican members of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, Curt Lilly and Scott Mares, filed a suit in Waynesboro Circuit Court on Oct. 4 challenging the constitutionality of the vote count in Virginia, and in the suit and media interviews, they have asserted that they will not vote to certify the local election results absent a court order.
A countersuit was filed on Oct. 22 by a group of five Waynesboro voters asking the Circuit Court to issue that order in advance of the Nov. 15 deadline to certify the vote.
A hearing in the dueling suits has been set for Tuesday at 1 p.m.
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At issue is the fate of the thousands of votes that have been cast and will be cast in the 2024 elections.
The Virginia Public Access Project reported on Monday that there have been 4,327 early votes cast in Waynesboro.
This total trails the total of 4,943 that had been cast nine days before the 2020 presidential election.
That was at the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, when 63.4 percent of the votes cast overall in Waynesboro that cycle were early votes.
There were 10,717 votes cast in Waynesboro in the 2020 election.
It’s fair to assume that we’re tracking toward cracking the 10,000-votes-cast mark in the city in the 2024 cycle.
The 2020 election cycle in the city, notably, did not include elections for seats on Waynesboro City Council.
The 2020 cycle still had us voting for City Council members in May, at a much lower participation rate.
The turnout that May was in the area of 2,800 voters, less than a third of the total votes cast that November.
There are three seats on the ballot in the 2024 cycle – in Ward A, Ward B and the At-Large seat.
Three independents – Lorie Strother in Ward A, Terry Short Jr. in Ward B and Bobby Henderson in the At-Large race – are facing a group of Republican nominees.
That group – Dave Goetze in Ward A, Will Flory in Ward B and Jeremy Sloat in the At-Large race – were all signed off on as party nominees by the city vice mayor, Jim Wood, who is the chair of the Waynesboro Republican Committee.
Wood, as the Republican chair, also nominated Lilly and Mares for their positions on the electoral board.
It’s fair to wonder aloud why the Republicans on the electoral board don’t want to certify the local election results.
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Chris Graham
