Revisiting Primary Day 2022 in Isle of Wight
I learned more about civics in one year of Michael Vines being in office than I did my in all of my previous education, this is one of those lessons...
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Today is Primary Day in Virginia. It is also (due to really dumb legislation) the final day for local independent candidates to submit their signatures to be placed on the ballot in November. This puts local registrars (the people responsible for running voting and verifying signatures for ballot petitions) in a bad spot because they have to manage two big events simultaneously. Registrars already have a thankless job with months of important, mundane work mixed in with a handful of days each year of chaos, namely election/primary days and due dates for candidates to turn in paperwork. Of course, responsible candidates can help the Registrar by not waiting until the last minute to turn in their paperwork, considering they can start collecting signatures in January. Inevitably, some candidates always wait until the last minute, which is their right, regardless of how inconvenient it is to those responsible for ensuring our elections and election processes are free, fair, and accurate.
Honestly, until last year WTF! didn’t know much about the candidate process. However, twice attempting to remove an appointed school board member (Michael Vines) was a rapid education in collecting signatures properly and how those signatures are officially verified through the Registrar. So, when WTF! heard last year that Michael Vines had the police called on him for election interference during the June 2022 primary at Windsor Town Center, it had to be investigated further. Given that again this year, some candidates are waiting until the last minute to submit signatures, WTF! thought it would be instructive to recap last year’s shenanigans as we see how the dust settles later this week with some of these last minute candidates.
Last June, Michael Vines, an appointed school board member for the Windsor/4th District, attempted to collect the required 125 signatures to be placed on the November 2022 ballot to run for his appointed seat. On June 18, 2022 (a Saturday and the last day of early voting for the Primaries), Mr. Vines turned in seven signature sheets totaling 138 signatures. Six of the forms are properly notarized; the seventh form is not so properly notarized.
Proper Notary Example (forms 1-6)
Not So Proper Notary Example (form 7)
What is wrong with the second notary example?
It is illegible
Notary commissions always expire on the last day of the month (how does a notary forget this?)
The Notary’s registration number is “corrected”, (again how does a notary mess this up)
The “Notary” puts his name in the “cirulator’s name” section
Most importantly, it isn’t stamped, which is a direct material omission
WTF! actually reached out to the Notary whose registration number is listed. The Notary is a professional “24/7 notary” who was strangely uninterested in the idea that his notary/signature was potentially forged.
WTF! isn’t outright saying it was forged, but a reasonable person could have doubts…
Out of an act of kindness, the Registrar validated the signatures (including the questionable seventh form) and informed Mr. Vines that 39 of his 138 signatures are invalid. Therefore, he is 26 signatures short of qualifying for the ballot. The signatures are deemed invalid for various reasons, including signatures from non-registered voters, voters not in the 4th District, etc. At 1:35PM on June 21, 2022, Mr. Vines returned to the Registrar with two more ballot forms and 28 additional signatures. Some of these signatures Mr. Vines collected at the Windsor Town Center polling location during the Primary Voting. As the below video shows, Mr. Vines was breaking the law by conducting political activities during an election; he was in the ballot area collecting signatures and refused to leave until poll workers called the police. In another act of kindness towards Mr. Vines, he was not charged with a crime.
WTF! wrote in the Smithfield Times about it (the only coverage the incident received), but due to space limitations, couldn’t go into the level of detail of this post.
Again out of kindness, not a requirement, and ultimately an action the Registrar would later regret, they attempted to validate the signatures. This time they found 6 of the 28 signatures invalid, leaving Mr. Vines four signatures short of qualifying for the ballot. Mr. Vines would return to the Registrar again at 7:00PM (the deadline for submitting signatures) with four more signatures (all valid) and finally qualifies for the ballot. The Registrar notarized his final ballot sheet, which, amazingly enough, is technically not illegal, but certainly not a “best practice.” Admittedly, the rest of this gets pretty nerdy/in the weeds; if you have questions, please write in the comments or email me at windsor.transparency.forum@gmail.com.
WTF! did not learn of Mr. Vines’s polling place shenanigans…
until late June and then immediately FOIA’d Mr. Vines’s ballot petitions. The FOIA is where the above timeline is derived from. Upon my review of the FOIA data, material omissions were obvious, which should have caused numerous signatures to be invalidated. This should have led to Mr. Vines being removed from the ballot. However, the Vines discovery led to other discoveries and before we knew it, 7 of the 14 local candidates were found to have material omissions in their ballot petitions that would have led to them being removed from the ballot.
The State Department of Elections, in an extremely questionable, non-legal opinion, determined that since the candidates had already been deemed “qualified” before the material omissions were discovered, the candidates could only be removed by the Circuit Court. WTF! fundamentally disagreed with allowing the candidates to stay on the ballot, especially since, in neighboring Suffolk, a local candidate was removed from the ballot well after he was initially “qualified.” The difference between the two situations is that Suffolk received a legal opinion from the Virginia Office of the Attorney General due to fraudulent signatures. However, the Suffolk candidate was ultimately removed not because 78 out of 225 signatures were deemed fraudulent, because only removing those signatures still would have given him enough (147 of the 125 required) to stay on the ballot. He was ultimately removed because Suffolk determined that the person who collected those signatures did not use an accurate address in her circulator affidavit, which allowed Suffolk to throw out all the signatures (fraudulent or authentic) on the ballot forms she filed, which ultimately brought the candidate below the 125 threshold. WTF! challenged the Isle of Wight opinion vs the Suffolk opinion with the State but was essentially told, “You’re not wrong, but we aren’t going to embarrass the Department of Elections, especially after early voting started.” So everyone stayed on the ballot in Isle of Wight.
After this debacle, WTF! pushed a couple of state legislators to try to sponsor amended legislation to decouple Primary Day from the local candidate ballot signature deadline, but it didn’t make the cut for the 2023 session. WTF! also pushed for the Office of the Attorney General to work with the Department of Elections to clarify when and how a candidate becomes “qualified” and what to do when a mistake is made, but that effort went nowhere.
Fortunately, there have been some positive changes made since last year. But, the Isle of Wight Registrar’s Office is much better informed now than they were this time last year. WTF! believes the Isle of Wight Electoral Board (at least some of them) were sufficiently embarrassed by last year’s situation that they will not be as forgiving as they were last year and they will seek better guidance from the State if another issue comes up. Lastly, WTF! and others are smarter this year too. You can bet FOIA requests will go out on Wednesday morning to review ballot petitions and immediately bring up any material omissions, especially for those candidates filing during the past week. People can believe what they want to believe about voting machines, boxes of ballots, voter suppression, and anything else we have seen as “election issues” by both sides of the political aisle since the 2000 Presidential election. However, if you are unwilling to provide constructive scrutiny of local elections, where a couple of votes really do matter, you are missing the forest for the trees.