On Saturday, the Lynchburg Republican City Committee named Veronica Bratton, Marty Misjuns and Larry Taylor as its nominees for open Lynchburg City Council seats following a party-run nomination process. By Wednesday, the Republican Party of Virginia had received three appeals objecting to the process.
The appeals will move through the state party’s review process until a final ruling is issued on June 13, said Jeff Ryer, the chair of the Republican Party of Virginia.
“Until the appeals are settled, the election, for us, is not over. The nomination process is completed when the appeals are settled and exhausted,” he said.
The appeals come after more than 1,600 voters visited the Brookville Ruritan Club on Saturday for the party-run nomination process, called a firehouse primary, to whittle 10 candidates down to three nominees. The nomination method was the only process of its kind held in Virginia this year, and the first to be executed since a new state law that favors, but doesn’t explicitly require, state-run primaries was enacted.
A candidate, voter or any party that feels they were negatively affected by a party-run event has the right to appeal to the party directly, Ryer said.
The state party received three separate appeals regarding Lynchburg’s firehouse primary by the end of the day Wednesday, Ryer said. The names of the appellants and the details of their appeals cannot be released at this time, he added, to protect the integrity of the review while the nomination process is still active.
Each appeal has the same respondent — the Lynchburg Republican City Committee — so they will be evaluated together, Ryer said.
The evaluation process starts with a review by a five-member appeals committee, Ryer said. The committee is made up of members of the party’s state central committee — two selected by the appellants, two selected by the respondent and one selected by the four members already tapped.
The committee’s job, Ryer said, is to assess the evidence, conduct fact-finding as necessary and produce a report.
The report is then forwarded to the entire state central committee — which consists of about 70-80 members, Ryer said, and is tasked with ruling on the appeals on June 13.
The appeals of the firehouse primary are “not the first that we have received that involve nominations,” Ryer said, and outcomes of such appeals have varied over time depending on the situation. “It ranges: Everything from, ‘This is O.K.’ to ‘This needs to be redone,’” he said.
General practice, Ryer said, is that appellants request remedies when they file their appeals. That doesn’t mean that those remedies will be granted by the end of the process, he said, but it gives the appeals committee a starting point of understanding.
Some remedies can be extreme, Ryer said. In 2019, for example, the state central committee selected Scott Wyatt as the 97th District’s nominee after the local party’s nomination process for a House of Delegates seat went awry.
The appeals process is run by the party, Ryer said, which means all appeals are based on concerns that the party’s governing document, called the state party plan, was not followed. The state party plan requires that state law be followed, Ryer said, so if somebody “cites something that was a violation of the Code of Virginia, it would be taken seriously in the appeals process.”
Some voters have been voicing concerns about the fairness of the firehouse primary on social media, saying that planners of the firehouse primary were openly campaigning for select candidates; the local party released a statement saying which candidates it was “not able to officially approve”; and a process of provisional voting left some voters confused about whether their vote was counted.
“Any claims that ‘provisional ballots’ had an impact on the outcome is not true. Only twenty-eight provisional ballots were not counted and those ballots, if all were counted in favor of the challenging candidates, still would not change the outcome,” the local party released in a statement June 1.
Also in the June 1 statement, the Lynchburg Republican City Committee “reaffirmed the accuracy and integrity” of the firehouse primary. “The Committee expressed confidence in the integrity of the process and reiterated its support for the duly nominated Republican candidates who will appear on the ballot in November,” the statement reads.
On June 2, the local party released another statement saying “the results of the May 30, 2026 firehouse primary have been officially certified” and that “the certification reflects both the will of the voters and the Committee’s commitment to transparency and accuracy.”
