It’s nearly a week after the election and we still don’t know who won the Roanoke mayor’s race or one of the school board seats in Radford or possibly even a council seat in Lynchburg.
Why don’t we know and why are the numbers changing well after election night?
David Bowers, the Republican candidate for mayor in Roanoke, calls this “fishy.” It’s not. What we’re seeing is simply the consequence of some changes in election law that Virginia enacted in 2021, and therefore have never been in place for a presidential election (or some of these local elections).
Let’s go over this.
Virginia now counts two types of ballots after Election Day.
The numbers reported on election night have always been unofficial numbers. Because of changes to Virginia’s election laws, they’re now both unofficial – and partial.
Two types of ballots don’t get counted until after Election Day – the final mail ballots and provisional ballots.
Virginia now accepts mail ballots up until noon on the Friday after the election as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day. It’s these final mail ballots that caused the lead in the Roanoke mayor’s race to change Friday evening. After Election Day, Bowers led by 19 votes over Democrat Joe Cobb, which later shrank to 11 votes. Once those final mail ballots were tallied, Cobb moved out to a lead of 46 votes.
Here’s how how those vote tallies looked:
Candidate Vote tally on Wednesday Post-election mail ballots Current totals David Bowers (R) 14,821 30 14,851 Joe Cobb (D) 14,810 87 14,897 Stephanie Moon (I) 9,966 76 10,002
That disparity between the mail ballot count and the total vote shouldn’t surprise anyone. Democrats have always liked mail voting a lot more than Republicans, so mail balloting always tends to skew Democratic.
In Lynchburg, the final mail ballots in the Ward IV council race have tightened that contest. Before the final mail ballots were counted, Republican Chris Faraldi held a 167-vote lead over Democrat April Watson. Now it’s down to 144 votes.
In all these cases, the provisional ballots have yet to be counted. More on provisionals shortly but first some context about these mail ballots.
Virginia is one of 17 states that counts mail ballots that arrive after Election Day
While this post-election counting may be considered a liberal innovation, the 17 states (plus the District of Columbia) that allow this are almost an even split of blue state and red states. This may be one of the few things that California and Mississippi agree on. The philosophy here is akin to your tax return: You don’t have to get it to the Internal Revenue Service by April 15; you just have to have it postmarked by then.
Among the states that count properly-postmarked mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, Texas has the shortest window: 5 p.m. the day after the election. Virginia has the next shortest window, tied with conservative Kansas and liberal Massachusetts at three days. The longest windows for these post-election mail ballots are 10 days in California and 14 days in Illinois. (This is why some U.S. House races in California still aren’t decided yet.) Utah’s deadline is by the official canvass, which is ranges between 7-14 days after the election. Washington state doesn’t set a deadline at all but localities certify their elections 21 days after Election Day.
The biggest number of ballots yet to be counted are provisional ballots
The number of post-election mail ballots is dwarfed by the number of provisional ballots. Roanoke had 193 mail ballots arrive after the election but it has 1,223 provisional ballots yet to be dealt with.
Provisional ballots are ballots from voters whose registration is in question. For instance, if someone shows up and their name isn’t in the pollbook of voters but the voter insists he or she is registered there, the voter can cast a provisional ballot. It’s put in a special envelope and set aside so that later election officials can check to see if there was a mistake.
The biggest number of provisional ballots, though, come from people who register to vote on Election Day. In Roanoke, 811 of those 1,223 provisional ballots come from same-day voter registrants. This is where the delays are coming from. All that information has to be checked to make sure the voters are really eligible voters – and aren’t double-registered somewhere else. State law gives registrars until 5 p.m. Monday to verify all that information.
Virginia is one of 21 states (or maybe 22 or 23) that allow same-day registration
As with the post-election mail ballots, we see same-day registration in both liberal and conservative states. These states are primarily on the West Coast, the Rockies, the Midwest and New England. The South is the big exception to this trend. Virginia is the only Southern state that allows same-day voter registration on Election Day. Fun fact: Conservative North Dakota doesn’t have voter registration at all, so the effect is the same: You just need to show up with proper identification and you can vote. If we add North Dakota, we’re up to 22 states. North Carolina allows same-day registration only during early voting. So that’s 23 with some kind of same-day registration provision.
This is a case where liberal California and liberal Massachusetts disagree (the former has same-day voter registration; the latter does not) but liberal California and conservative Wyoming agree. So do liberal Illinois and conservative Idaho. In this year’s presidential election, 12 of the same-day registration states voted for Donald Trump, 11 for Kamala Harris; so while a lot of Virginia Republicans don’t like same-day registration, we can’t categorically say there’s a partisan split nationally on the subject.
Same-day registration hasn’t been a factor in Virginia elections until now (with two exceptions)
Same-day registration started in Virginia in 2022 and wasn’t really a factor then. The top races that year were U.S. House races and most of those weren’t particularly close; the few that were close were on the other side of the state so those of us on the western side of the state had little reason to pay attention to this new development.
In last year’s General Assembly races, same-day registration only played into two races – both districts with universities where a lot of college students turned out to vote Democratic. In House District 41, which covers parts of Montgomery and Roanoke counties, Republican Chris Obenshain saw his 943-vote lead on election night dwindle to a final margin of 183 as those provisional ballots (mostly same-day registrants among Virginia Tech students) were verified and counted. In Senate District 24, which includes Williamsburg, Democrat Monty Mason hoped those provisional ballots would help him overcome an election night deficit to Republican Danny Diggs. They didn’t, but they did close the gap some.
This year, though, we had a presidential election, which always drives turnout up – and with it this year, same-day registration. Last year, Virginia had 25,926 provisional ballots, of which 15,981 were same-day registrants. This year, Virginia has 122,494 provisional ballots, of which 84,522 are same-day registrants. That’s more than the entire population of Lynchburg showing up on Election Day and registering to vote.
The number of provisional ballots isn’t equally distributed across the state
Here’s the catch that Virginia will have to figure out: The burden of dealing with these same-day registrants falls most heavily on communities with colleges. Floyd County and Radford have about the same population. Floyd had 80 people register on Election Day. Radford had 472 (and 545 provisionals overall). That’s more people than Radford saw register in the city for the whole year leading up to Election Day. Some more context: In last year’s state legislative elections, Radford had just 34 same-day registrants. This year’s 472 is 13.9 times more. The work of verifying all these registrants by the state’s deadline of Monday at 5 p.m.seems an unreasonable burden to place on a small registrar’s office, but nobody asked my opinion here. (See Lisa Rowan’s story on how Radford is struggling to deal with this flood of registrations.)
Other university communities face similar challenges: Montgomery County, home of Virginia Tech, saw 3,844 same-day registrants. The only difference is Montgomery County doesn’t have any local races hanging on the counting of those votes; Radford does. Brian Dobbins appears to have taken one of the two school board seats but just 27 votes separate Amanda Winter and Ben Buzzard for second seat with up to 545 provisionals yet to be verified and then counted.
Candidate Current vote tally (includes final mail ballots but not provisionals) Brian Dobbins 2,338 Amanda Winter 2,053 Ben Buzzard 2,026 Kelsey Marletta 1,697 Rebecca Dunn 1,121 Write-ins 55
Montgomery County had the third highest number of same-day registrants in the state. Only Fairfax County (10,438) and Prince William County (5,101) had more – a function of the sheer size of those localities (and, of course, the sheer size of Virginia Tech.). More context: Montgomery’s number of same-day registrants is slightly higher than the number in Loudoun County, even though Loudoun County is 4.2 times bigger. I’d bet legislators representing these localities may look to Richmond for some funding to help pay for temporary workers in the registrar’s office before the next election.
Lynchburg had 1,925 same-day registrations. Some 1,200 of those came from Liberty University students and are in just a single ward in the city’s four council wards. Republican Curt Diemer leads the balloting so far in the race for the Ward III council seat and those Liberty votes are expected to skew Republican. Still, that’s a lot of votes uncounted in a single council seat. Meanwhile, the question in the Ward IV race, where are said to be 334 provisionals, is how many of those come from University of Lynchburg students. Could those go so strongly Democratic that Democrat April Watson is able to make up her 144-deficit behind Republican Chris Faraldi? The math for her is daunting but not impossible.
We may not know who won some of these close races until later in the week
The deadline for verifying all these same-day registrants is Monday at 5 p.m. But the actual counting of those ballots may not come until later in some localities. In Radford, registrar Lindsey Williams says her electoral board will meet Wednesday to start counting the ballots cast by the same-day registrants and that, given the volume, the counting might stretch into Thursday. By law, it has to be concluded by Friday.
The changes in our voting laws have made voting more convenient on the front end for voters but are resulting in delays in counting those ballots. We thought the presidential race nationally would take days or weeks to resolve. Instead, that was over pretty quickly but it may take almost two weeks before we can figure out who won a school board race in a city of 16,000.
Did a teenage girl from Hopewell save Lafayette from being captured by the British?
This year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. To prepare for that, Cardinal is telling some of the little-known stories about Virginia’s role in independence. In this month’s edition of Cardinal 250, we look at Susanna Bolling, a 16-year-old girl from what is now Hopewell, who is credited with riding through the night to alert the Marquis de Lafayette of a British plot to capture him. The big question: Did this really happen? We have a story on the legend and a podcast with the author of a book about Bolling.
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