The Virginia Supreme Court has picked Sean P. Trende and Bernard N. Grofman to serve as “special masters” who will redraw voting districts throughout the state.

The decision comes after weeks of controversy concerning the failure of the new Virginia Redistricting Commission to select the two people to redraw the maps. Consequently, the decision was turned over to the Virginia Supreme Court, which rejected all three Republican nominees and one from the Democratic side.

After the parties came up with new candidates this week, the court made its choice on Friday.

Trende, nominated by Republicans, is a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics and is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

He is a lawyer and journalist with degrees from Yale and Duke Universities. The Washington Times has called him a “premier numbers cruncher.” A frequent guest on Fox News, CNN Radio and PBS’s “All Things Considered,” he is the author of the book “Lost Majority.” He practiced law for eight years at the  Kirkland & Ellis law firm in Chicago and the former Hunton & Williams firm in Richmond.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Republicans in Virginia have two extra days to nominate new redistricting special masters to help the state’s Supreme Court redraw legislative and Congressional districts.

The court extended the deadline Monday for submitting new candidates’ names until 5 p.m. Wednesday, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. However, Republicans’ request for a conference call with the court was denied.

Under a constitutional amendment approved by voters last year, redrawing districts fell to the court when the Virginia Redistricting Commission ended in partisan deadlock.

On Friday, the court rejected all three Republican special master nominees and one unidentified Democratic candidate. The parties were given until 5 p.m. Monday to submit new names.

Later Friday, Republican leaders requested the extension and the rejection of all three Democratic nominees. Monday’s order from the court didn’t reference that request to reject the Democratic nominees.

The Virginia State Supreme Court has rejected three “special master” candidates nominated by Republicans to help redraw Virginia’s legislative lines.

The nominees, the justices said in an order this morning, will serve as officers of the court in a “quasi-judicial capacity” and therefore “must be neutral and must not act as advocates or representatives of any political party.”

The court ordered the Republicans to come up with three new candidates by Monday. It also dropped a Democratic candidate, who was not named, because of his stated concerns about working with another map-drawer as the process requires, and told party members they also had until Monday to come up with another nominee.

The decision came after outcry from Democrats that the Republican nominees had obvious conflicts of interest. “It troubles me that the Republicans would even try this,” says Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, who had served on the redistricting commission but resigned this week.

The court’s decision is the latest turn as the state struggles with a new regime to draw new legislative boundaries for state and federal races next year.  A bipartisan 16-member commission was created by a Constitutional amendment to move the process away from the secretive traditional method employed by the majority party in the General Assembly.

Concerned about the election?

The Virginia Department of Elections has launched a new website, “Vote With Confidence” that offers residents information on when and where they can vote; key dates and deadlines for voting; how Virginia’s election process is conducted; and facts about the checks and balances used to combat any voting irregularities and ensure the accuracy of election outcomes.

The website is at www.elections.virginia.gov/voter-ed/

The site also includes a section called “Mythbusters,” offering facts versus fiction to address concerns voters may have on cybersecurity, voter fraud and other issues.

For example: “A record number of deceased voters cast ballots in 2020.”

That’s a myth, according to the website. The Virginia Department of Elections uses one of the “premier list maintenance programs in the country, including routine removal of deceased individuals” from voter rolls, according to the website. The site then offers a link to a report the public can access on voter roll maintenance efforts.

“While the voting process is something most Virginians pay attention to a few days every year, the system that ensures a trusted election outcome never stops,” said Christopher Piper, commission of the Virginia Department of Elections. “That is the job of more than 133 certified registrars and their staff who follow 470

pages of election law. They work year-round to ensure free, fair and transparent elections with the help of some 15,000 volunteers. They know how rigorous and meticulous our election process is.

“Now this website exists so the public can share that same confidence in casting their vote and in our election outcomes,” he stated.

Voters can use the new website or call the department at (800) 552-9745 with any questions about the Nov. 2 election or the process.

Bipartisan agreement created the Virginia Redistricting Commission, but political disagreement along party lines is causing its failure, leaving some wondering how to successfully chart unbiased electoral maps.
The commission is a first-time endeavor for the state, and proceedings have been about as bumpy as a maiden voyage can get.
The commission is tasked with determining on a map how to evenly divide voters into Virginia’s political regions, for both state and national government. The idea is to avoid a map that is gerrymandered, or drawn in such a way that districts are manipulated for political gain, but this is not an ideal redistricting setup, according to experts and commission members alike.

There’s been talk among the commission about switching Roanoke from the 6th Congressional District — which includes Lynchburg and extends north to the Shenandoah Valley — to the 9th District, comprising all of Southwest Virginia. But those discussions have taken a back seat as the conversation turns instead toward procedural disagreement.

The 16-member commission has been stalled by split 8-8 votes. Following another set of split votes at a meeting Wednesday morning, members of the commission, including Democrat Co-Chair Greta Harris, criticized how the group is organized, and its inability to find agreement.

“I would say we tried and it was a first for the commonwealth of Virginia, but this isn’t working,” Harris said, adding that the bureaucracy and a partisan structure won out.

Virginia’s bipartisan Redistricting Commission put work on House of Delegates and state Senate districts behind it Thursday and moved on to redrawing congressional district boundaries.

In taking up the state’s 11 U.S. House boundaries, the bipartisan commission punted on its duty to remap state legislative districts to the Virginia Supreme Court.

Without comment on partisan rifts that scuttled their work on the 40 state Senate districts and 100 House of Delegates seats, commissioners got their first glimpse of tentative competing congressional drafts from Democratic and Republican consultants advising the panel. And within minutes, partisan differences emerged anew alongside related concerns about geography, demography and topography.

Del. Marcus Simon, D-Fairfax, one of eight state legislators (four from each party) on the evenly split 16-member panel, questioned a proposal from GOP consultants that grafts a small sliver of an affluent Henrico County suburb bounding the James River west of Richmond onto the massive 5th Congressional District, which elected U.S. Rep. Bob Good, R-Campbell, last year.

“The thing that sort of stands out … is you take out a little bit of Henrico County (and) put it all the way in with Southside,” Simon said. “That is what starts to feel like a gerrymander to the extent that it’s cracking suburbs that were trending blue.

“I can’t imagine someone in Henrico feels like they have any congressional representation under that map; that they have anything in common with District 5” he said. “For all the folks on public comment who say we need to put our differences behind us, this is the kind of a move that makes me feel a little suspicious of where these lines really go.”

Another Democratic legislative member of the panel, Sen. George Barker of Fairfax, voiced a similar concern, noting that the 5th district pushes significantly into another increasingly Democratic Richmond suburb, Chesterfield County. Large parts of neighboring Henrico and Chesterfield are currently part of the 7th District, which is represented by Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger.

Richard Harrell III, a 5th District resident and Republican citizen member of the commission from South Boston, disputed the Democrats’ suggestion that partisan gamesmanship was driving the earliest drafts of the congressional maps. He said he believed the map was responsibly redrawn to center the 5th geographically in his region, an improvement over its elongated present configuration that stretches from the North Carolina border to “near the Maryland line” in Fauquier County, a drive of more than four hours.

“I think the characterization that there’s something underhanded about him taking the less northerly route – it’s better for us to leave the characterization alone,” Harrell said.

Later, Simon found it untenable that, by his count, both new maps create six Republican-majority districts and only five Democratic-voting ones in a state where the GOP has not won a statewide election since 2009.

“I want to be the bad guy and everyone online can yell at me,” he said, noting the partisan imbalance favoring the GOP, which now controls four of Virginia’s U.S. House seats. “It’s not competitive. You’ve got five very safe Democratic districts and six very safe Republican ones. …I don’t think either of these maps is a good place to start.”

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday appointed a three-judge panel to hear arguments on whether candidates who win election this year to Virginia’s House of Delegates should be forced to run again next year.

All 100 seats in the House are up for election in November; delegates typically run for a two-year term.

In a normal year, November’s elections would be the first conducted under constitutionally required redistricting under the 2020 census. But the census result s were badly delayed this year, and the state has been forced to run elections under the existing legislative boundaries because new ones still have not been drawn.

A lawsuit filed in Richmond by former Democratic Party Chairman Paul Goldman acknowledges that little can be done this year but conduct November’s balloting under the existing lines. His lawsuit, though, argues that new elections must be held in 2022 under newly drawn lines that properly align legislative districts with population shifts that have occurred in the state.

The Wason Center for Civic Leadership at Christopher Newport University released a new survey Friday that showed Democratic candidates for Virginia governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general still hold leads for the 2021 election.

The survey revealed that former current Democratic candidate and former Governor Terry McAuliffe leads Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin 49%-45% for the race for governor. McAuliffe led by five points in the last survey released by the Wason Center on August 26.

“The abortion issue has been tricky for Youngkin,” said Wason Center Research Director Dr. Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo. “Trying to navigate between moderate voters who oppose further restrictions while simultaneously appealing to the Republican base who would like a strong pro-life stance, Youngkin has said he would not have voted for the Texas law, but he’s been unclear about how far he would go to restrict abortions in Virginia.”

For lieutenant governor, Democratic Del. Hala Ayala leads former Republican Del. Winsome Sears, 48%-44%, with 8% undecided. The August 26 survey showed Ayala leading by 10 points, 52%-42%. Among Sears has gained 10 points (from 40% to 50%) among independent voters, while Ayala’s support has dropped from 49% to 41%.

Current Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring leads Republican candidate Del. Jason Miyares, 49%-43%, with 7% undecided. Herring led 53%-41% in the August 26 survey. Miyares increased his support 11 points over the last month among independents from 38% to 49%, while Herring has lost support among independents, from 49% to 41%.

RICHMOND, Va. — Early, in-person voting for the November election in Virginia begins on Friday. Registered voters can begin casting ballots at their local registrar’s office, according to the Virginia Department of Elections.

The race for Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General and House of Delegates districts will be in the hands of voters.

Topping the ticket for Virginia Democrats are former Governor Terry McAuliffe, Delegate Hala Ayala and current Attorney General Mark Herring. McAuliffe is seeking a second term four years after leaving office because Virginia law does not allow the governor to hold office for consecutive terms.

You can find your local registrar’s office here.

More information on voting early or registering to vote this November can be found here.

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a revamped voting rights bill that would expand voter registration as well as create nonpartisan redistricting committees, but the measure is still likely to face an uphill battle in an evenly divided Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he will bring the legislation to the floor of the Senate “as soon as next week,” but supporters will need the backing of 10 Republicans to advance beyond a GOP filibuster.

The 592-page bill, spearheaded by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Rules Committee, is the product of months-long negotiations with moderate Sen. Joe Manchin III, (D-W.Va.).

Manchin wavered on an earlier package of sweeping elections reforms and voting rights initiatives, the For the People Act, that passed the House in March but stalled in the Senate. This new version has been dubbed the Freedom to Vote Act.

“I applaud Sen. Manchin for his work here,” Schumer said. “He has always said that he wants to try and bring Republicans on, and now, with the support of Democrats and this compromise bill—which Sen. Manchin had great input into — he can go forward in that regard.”

Endorsements don’t necessarily mean a whole lot when it comes to determining who’s going to win an election. But they can illustrate alliances, partnerships and factions that develop over time. To that end, the chart below traces 70 endorsements by sitting state and federal elected officials in Virginia in next month’s Democratic primary for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

Manipulate the visualization by clicking and dragging candidates (big circles) or their supporters (small circles); select or deselect races by clicking the legend. For best results, view on a desktop or tablet.

For years, local officials have been complaining that Virginia’s all-encompassing election software — which powers everything from voter registration to absentee ballots to list maintenance to transmission of results — is slow and hard to use.

A 2018 report from state auditors verified those frustrations, concluding the Virginia Election and Registration Information System, or VERIS, was “not sufficiently functional or reliable.”

Election administrators are planning to fix that by by replacing the IT system, a project estimated to cost between $20 million and $29 million.

Though voters may not notice a major change, officials said, the workers assisting them will hopefully have a much smoother time calling up information in the new system and making changes to a voter’s status.

As lawmakers prepare to study the prospects for campaign finance reform in Virginia, the sheer size of some checks flowing to Democratic candidates for statewide office has renewed debate about the boosts offered by a wealthy Charlottesville couple topping charts as the biggest donors in state politics.

Though they backed opposing candidates in the 2017 Democratic primary for governor, donations connected to Michael Bills, a hedge fund manager and primary backer of the advocacy group Clean Virginia, and Sonjia Smith, a philanthropist and former lawyer married to Bills, are working in tandem this year in a big way.

Smith and Clean Virginia have given a combined $1.1 million, $600,000 from Clean Virginia and $500,000 from Smith, to former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, whom they believe has the best shot at challenging former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in a five-person Democratic primary field. That’s almost a third of the roughly $3.6 million in cash contributions Carroll Foy reported raising as of March 31.

Despite the early efforts to paint the Republicans’ 2021 ticket as an overwhelming lurch to the right, the slate isn’t nearly as extreme as it might’ve been. Instead of Chase, a self-described “Trump in heels,” becoming the party’s standard-bearer in a state former President Donald Trump lost twice, she logged off and went to the beach.

After failing to win a statewide election since 2009, some Republicans say they feel surprisingly good about where the party stands coming out of a chaotic unassembled convention marked by procedural confusion, mysterious attack ads and infighting.

“I think some of the ebullience you see in Republicans right now is that this could’ve been very bad. And it turned into the exact opposite,” said Shaun Kenney, a former Republican Party of Virginia executive director who has criticized fringe elements in the party. “But it’s more than just a sigh of relief. It’s like we finally know where we’re headed.”

Virginia voters in a recent poll ranked themselves as moderate, with a slightly conservative lean, but indicated support of more progressive legislation.

The poll, released last week by Christopher Newport’s Wason Center for Civic Leadership, could be a thermometer for the upcoming November election.

Virginia voters ranked themselves an average of 5.83 on a zero to 10 scale (liberal to conservative). Republicans ranked themselves 8.11 on average, while Democrats rated themselves 3.57 on average. Independents ranked themselves 5.72.

“In this upcoming election, it is especially possible that it could be competitive,” said Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, research director at the Wason Center.

Those surveyed support Democrat proposals on health care, immigration, environmental policy and the economy. The policy proposal with the strongest support was Medicare for all with 76 percent support among voters. A majority of Virginians support providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (73 percent). Almost all Virginians support a pathway to citizenship for children brought to this country illegally by their parents (94 percent).

More than half of Virginians agree with implementing an environmentally friendly redesign of the state’s economy and infrastructure (65 percent); that the economic system favors the wealthy (61 percent); and that the federal minimum wage should be $15 per hour (53 percent).

To hear some candidates tell it, a decision last week by the State Board of Elections is heavy-handed and reeks of political chicanery. The board’s move prevents a few Democratic Party challengers from getting on the primary ballot in contests for the House of Delegates this year.

The three-member board, these candidates claim, won’t provide the usual extension it has allowed previously to people who file late or incomplete reports. Three Black candidates, all facing Democratic incumbents in the primary, are the people most affected. They say the board won’t give them a “do-over” customarily granted to politicos in the past.

Two of the Democratic incumbents benefiting from this ruling are White, and one is Black.

(Five other candidates with paperwork problems — Democrats and Republicans alike — are the only people seeking their party’s nominations in their district, allowing them to be nominated for the November ballot.)

Apparently fed up with paperwork coming in late, Virginia’s State Board of Elections has refused to extend a key campaign filing deadline this year, potentially affecting eight candidates running for the House of Delegates.

Three are Democrats looking to challenge incumbent lawmakers, meaning, if the decision stands, Dels. Luke Torian, D-Prince William, Betsy Carr, D-Richmond, and Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, may not face primary challengers after all. Because they represent strongly Democratic districts, their primary opponents being disqualified on technical grounds all but guarantees the incumbents will win re-election.

The decision to insist on meaningful deadlines comes after years of officials wrestling with how to handle paperwork errors, reflecting a growing feeling on the board that candidates must take responsibility for their own campaigns and follow through to ensure their documents get to the right place.

statewide audit of Virginia’s 2020 election results verified President Joe Biden’s victory in the state, finding only a 0.00000065117 percent chance the state’s voting system could have produced an inaccurate outcome.

“Election officials are over 99 percent confident in the reported outcome,” Karen Hoyt-Stewart, voting technology manager at the Virginia Department of Elections, told the State Board of Elections as she presented the audit report Wednesday.

The only way to reach 100 percent certainty would be for officials to manually review every ballot cast in the state. In other words, the audit found there’s almost zero chance a full recount would show a different outcome.

The risk-limiting audit, more of a mathematical exercise than an expansive investigation into how ballots were cast and counted, involved checking a random sample of paper ballots against the results reported by scanner machines.

It’s already too late for Virginia to redraw political districts in time for the 2021 House of Delegates races, but the U.S. Census Bureau’s decision to speed up its delivery of new population data means Virginia lawmakers could be voting on future maps right before the November elections.

Census officials had told states to expect to get the data by late September, but Virginia officials say they now expect to receive it by the second week of August.

Under the newly created Virginia Redistricting Commission’s constitutional timeline, receipt of the data starts a 45-day clock for the commission to submit new legislative maps to the General Assembly for an up-or-down vote. Once the legislature received the proposed maps, it has 15 days to vote on them.

When the federal Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, Virginia was one of nine states that drew special attention due to its history of racist election laws. That burden was lifted in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided enough time had passed that Virginia and other states could stop following an old rule requiring federal permission for changes that might affect minority voters.

With the future of federal voting protections now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, Democrats in the General Assembly have passed their own version of a voting rights act, making Virginia the first state in the South to do so.

The proposed law, now awaiting Gov. Ralph Northam’s signature, creates broad new protections against voter discrimination based on race, color or language. With Republicans in dozens of states looking to restrict voting access after former President Donald Trump’s loss, supporters of the Virginia legislation see it as a decisive move in the other direction.