Donald Trump hasn’t even lost yet, but the two Republican appointees to the Waynesboro Electoral Board are already trying to throw him a legal bone, filing suit in Waynesboro Circuit Court to pre-emptively contest the Nov. 5 vote count.
“The plaintiffs 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,” reads the suit, filed on Oct. 4 by Curtis Lilly, the chairman of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, and Scott Mares, the local board’s vice chair.
Here we go already, with the election-truthing.
The three-member local electoral board, like others across the Commonwealth of Virginia, has a 2-1 majority reflecting the political party of the sitting governor, in our case, Republican, with Glenn Youngkin in that post through January 2026.
The appointments are made by the local chairs of the party committees and confirmed by local Circuit Court judges.
In Waynesboro, the Republican Party is headed up by the city’s sitting vice mayor, Jim Wood, who is best-known for the controversy over his homophobic slur of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his now-defunct Facebook talk show last year.
Wood faced calls from fellow members of Waynesboro City Council to step down as vice mayor, and one member demanded that he resign his City Council seat, in the wake of the controversy over the slur, but Wood, who won the Ward D seat in the 2022 election cycle by 17 votes, after a blowout 12-point loss to Terry Short in his bid for the at-large seat in 2020, was able to survive the political fallout.
The Waynesboro Republican Committee counts among its City Council candidates in the 2024 cycle a North Carolina transplant, Dave Goetze, the vice president of research at the Wake Forest, N.C.,-based Electoral Education Foundation.
That outfit, which obsessively tracks voter registration in the Tar Heel State, almost entirely through the work of Goetze, with an eye on preserving so-called “election integrity,” was founded by Hal Weatherman, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in North Carolina.
Weatherman is the running mate of the sitting lieutenant governor in North Carolina, Mark Robinson, the notorious “black Nazi” and Holocaust-denier who is trailing Josh Stein, the Democratic attorney general in North Carolina, by double-digits in the polls.
Goetze’s interest in Waynesboro politics is your guess is as good as mine. He’s quite active on social media in his regular updates on North Carolina voting information, but his campaign Facebook page hasn’t been updated since posting an April 16 announcement that he had decided to run for the Ward A seat.
Which gets us to Lilly, a program engineer at HDT Global, a Northern Virginia-based federal defense contractor and former columnist for the Lee Enterprises-owned News Virginian, who parrots Big Lie talking points from 2020 in an affidavit attached to the suit related to the Nov. 5 election, claiming 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.
As for Mares, I can’t find much about him, other than that he owns a local bed-and-breakfast, and was quoted in a June 6 AFP article on a proposed local development speaking in favor of stricter housing regulations, which would seem to run counter to the Republican Party line on regulation.
But then, the idea being advanced in the suit over the Nov. 5 election itself runs counter to the messaging from the governor, Youngkin, whose office, in August, touted his administration’s election-security measures.
“We use 100 percent paper ballots with a strict chain of custody,” Youngkin said in the statement in his office’s press release. “We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet. We do not mass mail ballots. We monitor our drop boxes 24/7. We verify the legal presence and identity of voters using DMV data and other trusted data sources to update our voter rolls daily, not only adding new voters, but scrubbing the lists to remove those that should not be on it, like the deceased, individuals that have moved, and non-citizens that have accidentally or maliciously attempted to register.”
As it stands, Youngkin, and his Department of Elections, are facing a federal lawsuit over one key part of his election-security platform, with the suit, initiated by the Justice Department, alleging that the state is violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
“As the National Voter Registration Act mandates, officials across the country should take heed of the law’s crystal clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election,” said Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at DOJ.
“By cancelling voter registrations within 90 days of Election Day, Virginia places qualified voters in jeopardy of being removed from the rolls and creates the risk of confusion for the electorate,” Clarke said. “Congress adopted the National Voter Registration Act’s quiet period restriction to prevent error-prone, eleventh hour efforts that all too often disenfranchise qualified voters. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy and the Justice Department will continue to ensure that the rights of qualified voters are protected.”
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Chris Graham
