Judge dismisses suit by Lynchburg candidate whose first name on ballot was listed as ‘Christopher’ rather than ‘Chris’

A Lynchburg judge on Wednesday dismissed a suit by one of the city’s candidates for commonwealth’s attorney who wanted voting stopped and early votes discarded because he was listed on the ballot with his full first name “Christopher” and not the “Chris” he asked for.

When he submitted his candidate qualification form in January, he requested to appear on the ballot as “Chris G. White” and has been campaigning under the name Chris White. He filed a lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Elections on Oct. 10 for using his full name, Christopher G. White, on the ballot. 

White is running for commonwealth’s attorney against incumbent Bethany Harrison, who was elected in 2017 and reelected in 2021.

The lawsuit was filed about a month after early voting began and about three months after official candidate names had been posted on the election department’s website. 

White sought more than $900,000 in damages to cover the $50,000 that he’s put toward his campaign and one elected term’s worth of a commonwealth’s attorney’s salary. He also asked for voting to be stopped until the ballots were corrected and previously submitted votes were scrapped and redone.

White said his complaint is not about the name error, but about ensuring that local government is held accountable for being accurate. 

“It’s not the hill I want to die on. I understand that this is just a typo. It’s a human mistake,” he said. “But they need to fix it, and they’re not.”

Judge F. Patrick Yeatts, of the 24th Judicial Circuit of Virginia, dismissed the lawsuit, citing multiple procedural errors. He granted White permission to amend a writ of mandamus — a court order to a government official to perform a mandatory, non-discretionary duty — that White filed against the city’s registrar’s office on Oct. 17. 

That leaves White a path forward with his complaint, he said in an interview after the hearing.

“I’m going to fix what the judge told me to fix and come back because they need to correct what they did,” he said. 

Updated: White filed the amended writ of mandamus against Daniel Pense, Lynchburg’s General Registrar, on Thursday, according to court documents. He’s pursuing the same damages as he did with the initial lawsuit. 

This isn’t the first time White is taking city officials to court. In 2023, he filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Lynchburg, the city’s chief of police and nine other defendants involved in a criminal case brought against him. He was arrested in December 2021 on a felony charge of rape, and a jury acquitted him in February 2023.

Harrison, who observed the Wednesday hearing, said White’s mistakes in filing the lawsuit speak volumes. 

“My opponent has demonstrated that he is wholly inappropriate to be your next commonwealth’s attorney,” she said in an interview after the hearing. 

Later, in a press release, she wrote, “The people of Lynchburg deserve better than courtroom chaos and amateur mistakes. Our community’s safety is too important to entrust to someone who cannot file a lawsuit correctly or follow basic court procedures.”

White said he’s asking for the $900,000 because “if you don’t incorporate the money part of it, people will just ignore you.”

“Part of this is about money,” he said. “Mostly it’s about getting it right — government offices getting it right.”

Yeatts identified three main procedural errors during the hearing that led to the lawsuit’s dismissal. 

First, White filed as the wrong plaintiff, Yeatts said. According to court documents, the plaintiff name is listed as White’s campaign — “Chris White for City of Lynchburg Commonwealth Attorney” — not the individual person who White is. Humans can run for office, but campaigns can’t, the judge explained. 

Second, Yeatts said that White filed his complaint against the wrong defendant. 

Dennis Polio, the senior assistant attorney general who represented the Virginia Department of Elections at the hearing, said it’s local registrar’s offices that collect and record spellings of candidates’ names, not the Virginia Department of Elections. After learning of the lawsuit, the election department’s legal counsel informed White of his misunderstanding of the two bodies’ responsibilities, according to court documents. 

White then filed a petition for a writ of mandamus to include the Lynchburg General Registrar alongside the election department in the complaint. Regardless, Yeatts said, the original complaint against the election department doesn’t hold up. 

Third, Yeatts said White did not follow proper court procedures when amending his complaint.

When asked why he didn’t follow the rules for asking permission to make amendments, White said, “given the urgency of the matter, I tried to file this as quickly as possible.” He’s well aware that Election Day is less than two weeks away. 

When asked if he would make similar procedural errors if elected as commonwealth’s attorney, White said, “My opponent has an entire office, has an army of lawyers and assistants and paralegals that all do the little things and check things. I don’t have that. I think that I could do a much better job if I had all that.”

For more information on Lynchburg elections, see the Lynchburg page of our Voter Guide.