Two election officials in a rural Virginia town are suing the state over voting machines

RICHMOND – Two Republican election officials recently said in a lawsuit that they would not certify the results of the Nov. 5 election in a rural Virginia town unless ballots were counted by hand, perpetuating the false notion that machines counting the votes could be manipulated.

The lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Elections and the Board of Elections was filed earlier this month in Waynesboro, Virginia, by the city’s Board of Elections Chairman Curtis Lilly and Vice Chairman Scott Mares. In the complaint, Lilly and Mares argued that election officials do not have access to votes counted by machines, which they said prevents them from verifying “the results of the voting machine’s secret poll.”

The counting system, Lilly and Mares argued, violated a provision of the state constitution that requires such machines to be publicly visible.

“Because members of the Board of Elections are prohibited from counting ballots by hand, we cannot ensure that the vote counts determined by the voting machines match the votes recorded on the ballots,” Mares said in an affidavit sent to The Associated Press became.

Election board members filed the lawsuit in Waynesboro District Court. The attorney general’s office, which is defending the Department of Elections and the State Board of Elections, declined to comment on the pending litigation.

The lawsuit comes as election conspiracy theorists across the U.S. are moving to support hand-counted ballots, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed the past election was stolen from him. However, research shows that manual counting is more error-prone, more costly, and more likely to delay results.

In Virginia, voters cast their ballots on paper, which are then counted by machine. In August, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin filed an executive order requiring the devices to be tested before every election and never connected to the internet. In the same order, Youngkin required officials to update voter rolls daily to remove ineligible voters, a move the U.S. Department of Justice alleged in a recent lawsuit to be a violation of federal law.

“The Virginia model for election security is working,” Youngkin said in a statement in August. “This is not a Democratic or Republican problem, it is an American and Virginia problem.”

___

Olivia Diaz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.