Nearly 870,000 early ballots have been cast in Virginia’s statewide elections in advance of Saturday’s deadline to do so — lower than during last year’s presidential race but still a large jump from 2017 that reflects both the state’s eased restrictions for early voting and a heightened interest in a tight gubernatorial race with national ramifications.
Lines of voters streaming into satellite voting locations to cast an early ballot or slipping their absentee ballots into a mail slot or government drop-off box during the 45 days before an election have become a common sight in Virginia after the General Assembly made it easier to vote early last year.
Among other things, the state no longer requires an excuse to be provided before someone is qualified to vote by absentee ballot, and for the first time early voting this year could be done on Sunday.
Most of the record 2.6 million Virginians who took advantage of those changes during the presidential election were Democrats concerned about voting in person during the coronavirus pandemic, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans claimed without evidence that the process would be rife with fraud.
This year, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor, has been urging his supporters to vote early as much as Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee, with both candidates holding early-voting rallies to whip up enthusiasm.
As of Thursday, 867,646 Virginians have either voted in person or returned their absentee ballots, compared with 195,634 during the 2017 statewide races, before the voting laws changed, according to the state Department of Elections.
The high turnout may still favor Democrats, who are more likely to cast early ballots, political analysts say.
About a third of the early ballots cast have been in heavily Democratic and voter-rich Northern Virginia, which could benefit McAuliffe if that translates to a higher overall turnout in the region, said Quentin Kidd, director of Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership.
“Democrats seem to be banking on the idea that all of that vote out of Northern Virginia, and a lot of it in Fairfax County is early, is going to really help put McAuliffe over the finish line,” Kidd said. “The higher the percentage of the overall vote it is, that rationale makes more sense.”
But Youngkin’s early-voting rallies have also made a difference, particularly in rural, conservative parts of the state where voters have traditionally waited until Election Day to cast their ballots, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.
The sharpest increases in early voting since 2017 have been in places such as Hanover County, where the 15,830 people who voted early as of Thursday reflected a 660 percent spike from four years ago, and Roanoke County, where the nearly 10,520 voters who have cast early ballots represent a 489 percent increase, the VPAP analysis shows.
The change in Virginians’ voting habits has prompted election officials to take extra steps to ensure those ballots are safe and well-accounted for, hoping to avoid the charges of fraud that plagued the presidential election after many absentee ballots in Virginia that largely were for Joe Biden were reported late at night. No election fraud was found in the state in 2020.
For example, deep-blue Fairfax County, the state’s most populous locality, reported the tally for most of its 215,000 absentee ballots in last November’s presidential election after 11 p.m. — results that put Virginia in Biden’s favor after Trump appeared to be leading most of the night. Biden ultimately won Virginia by 10 points.
A change in election law passed this year will ensure that those early votes are tallied more quickly, by requiring local officials to begin scanning absentee ballots into ballot machines at least seven days before Election Day, state election officials said. Previously, preprocessing absentee ballots was optional.
Christopher Piper, commissioner of Virginia’s Department of Elections, said the requirement will mean that most localities will tally and report their absentee ballots shortly after the polls close at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
“By the time they get to Election Day, they should have processed all ballots received up until Election Day,” Piper said during a Wednesday news briefing. “We won’t see a delay in those ballots being counted.”
Piper said the new requirement provides another safeguard for ballot integrity because during each day of preprocessing, representatives from each political party will be there to confirm that the absentee ballots are eligible to be counted before they are fed into the machines.
Local elections officials said they have begun processing absentee ballots as quickly as they can.
Scott O. Konopasek, head of Fairfax’s elections office, said the county plans to report its early-voting results first, probably just after 7 p.m., where the tallies will be categorized by ballots cast in person and those cast absentee.
Fairfax has also changed its procedure for reporting its election night votes. Previously, the county’s nearly 230 precinct captains each telephoned the results in to the Fairfax government center, where the tallies would be added to a spreadsheet and reported that night. After the memory sticks from the voting machines were collected, any errors spotted in the vote tally would be fixed during the following days.
Now, the precinct captains will drive the memory sticks into the government center earlier in the night, enabling the county to report the accurate results sooner, Konopasek said.
“We’re eliminating all those potential human points of failure along the line,” he said.
Rebecca Green, co-director of the William & Mary Law School’s Election Law Program, said elections officials’ transparency in how they expect to report results on election night can go a long way in assuring voter confidence in the process, especially if last year’s delay in early-vote reporting can be avoided.
“The 2020 election happened obviously under a huge amount of duress, given election administrators in Virginia and elsewhere had to process an unusually high number of absentee ballots,” she said. “It did place a strain on the system, so I think it’s perfectly appropriate for the legislature to try to ease that going forward.”
Still, elections officials probably won’t be facing the same heightened reporting challenges that complicated election night last year, given that gubernatorial elections tend to draw fewer voters than presidential elections, officials said.
In Alexandria, for example, the office sent out about 11,000 mail-in ballots this year, compared with 37,000 last year, officials there said.
Arlington County Registrar Gretchen Reinemeyer said Virginia’s expansion of early voting undoubtedly has driven a big increase in early voting since 2017 — but also described both early in-person and mail-in voting this year as about half of what it was last year. In anticipation of that lower burden, her office decided to have fewer early-voting locations and shorter hours this year. There have been no problems with lines, she said.
Even so, the level of scrutiny during this election is likely to be high, prompting local election officials to be as transparent as possible about their procedures.
In Loudoun County, where more than 38,000 early ballots have been collected so far, officials have allowed Republican poll watchers concerned about election security to be on hand when ballot machines are set up for another day of early voting to confirm that they have not been tampered with or switched.
“We’re trying to be as transparent as we possibly can,” said Judy Brown, head of the county’s elections office.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it matters what we tell people,” she said. “Some people are going to believe that things are secure, and some people aren’t.”
