Election officials in Virginia began Thursday the process of recounting votes in one of two requested recounts of last month's statewide elections, which will determine whether Republicans swept the election cycle and reestablished a majority in the House of Delegates.
The recount of the 85th District began Thursday with representatives from both parties involved, with the 91st District's recount scheduled to take place next week, according to The Associated Press.
The 85th District race is currently led by Republican Karen Greenhalgh by a margin of 127 votes of the 28,413 counted in the November election over incumbent Democratic Delegate Alex Askey. In the 91st District, Republican A.C. Cordoza leads incumbent Democratic Delegate Martha Mugler by 94 votes out of 27,388 counted.
Virginia has no requirements for automatic recounts, so Askey and Mugler both requested recounts after the margins were announced.
If the recounts confirm the margins and declare both Republican challengers victorious, it would mean the party will have won all the statewide races in the November 2 election, including for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. The last time Republicans won a statewide race in Virginia was in 2009 when the party took all three races.
Chris Piper, the state's top elections official, has said the recounts are unlikely to change the results of either race.
However, if both races are potentially reversed after the recounts, Virginia's House would be locked at 50-50 at the statewide levels, which would likely force the parties to create some compromises.
For more reporting from The Associated Press, see below.
Representatives from both the Republican and Democratic parties took part in the secondary counting of ballots requested by Askew, who currently represents the 85th House District. The district covers a portion of the city of Virginia Beach.
Republicans—who won 52 districts, according to the certified results—have said they are confident their candidates' leads will hold.
The recount in the 91st District, which covers the cities of Hampton and Poquoson and York County, was expected to take place next week, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Electoral board officials said Thursday that they would be recounting about 20,000 ballots that were cast in person on election day in the 85th District. They were about halfway through that process by midafternoon, working with two machines designed to count 72 ballots a minute, though one was slightly underperforming.
Officials also have to recount all of the city's early voting and mail-in ballots—about 54,000—to ensure that they were accounting for all ballots that were meant for the 85th District. That process had not yet begun as of midafternoon, and officials declined to give an estimate for when the entire process would be finished.
Election officials expect there to be a total of roughly 28,000 votes cast in the 85th District, including in-person votes as well as those cast by mail or in early voting.
On Thursday morning, a few dozen people packed into a room on the second floor of an elections building in Virginia Beach as the ballots were fed into the two scanning machines. Groups of four or five people sat at a handful of tables and looked at any ballots that were determined by the machines to have write-in candidates, were not clearly marked or had some other issue.
Only 16 ballots of the roughly 1,000 that were first scanned in a machine Thursday morning had to be reviewed by a human, said Dave Belote, the Democratic vice chair of the electoral board. Most of those were "undervotes," meaning the voter selected a candidate for governor or other statewide office but not for someone in the House of Delegates. One of the ballots was a write-in for Bugs Bunny, Belote said.
On Friday, any ballots either side decides to challenge will be presented to a three-judge panel, which will go through them individually and rule on how they should be counted.
Both Mugler and Askew are incumbent freshmen who were first elected in 2019 when Democrats flipped both the House and Senate.
Because the margins in the Askew-Greenhalgh and Mugler-Cordoza races were under 0.5 percent, the costs will be covered by the state.
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