The leaders of the Republican Party of Virginia will meet Saturday to rule on three appeals objecting to the Lynchburg Republicans’ recent nomination process for city council candidates.
The state central committee, as it’s called, will review the findings of a five-person appeals committee.
The appeals committee ruled in a 3-2 vote Tuesday to side with the appellants, and on Wednesday it approved a list of remedies to correct “egregious violations of the basic tenets of the Republican Party of Virginia,” as described in the appeals committee’s majority opinion, provided to Cardinal News.
The list of seven remedies includes an order to nullify the results of the nomination and allow all interested candidates to file as independents in the general election.
The list of remedies also orders that the Lynchburg Republican City Committee be declared defunct and directs the state chairman, Jeff Ryer, to appoint replacements to the local party’s executive committee. They also direct Jeff Helgeson to be censured and barred from all party offices for the remainder of the current term. Helgeson, a former city council member, is a member of the three-person electoral board that oversaw the party’s nomination process and openly campaigned for select candidates.
The appeals 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 3-2 vote was split between the appellants’ and respondent’s appointees, with the mutually appointed member taking the side of the appellants.
Now it’s up to the full state central committee — which consists of about 80 members — to decide whether to agree with the appeals committee’s decision, edit it or rule something else entirely, Ryer said in an interview last week.
The Lynchburg Republican City Committee filed a 30-page motion to dismiss and close to 200 pages of evidence and affidavits to refute the claims made in the appeals. In a series of email announcements Friday, the local party cited state central committee governing standards, holes in the appeals process and other elements as reasons for “why this challenge should be rejected” and encouraged members of the state central committee to read the motion to dismiss ahead of Saturday’s vote.
The appeals stem from a May 30 nomination process, called a firehouse primary, at which about 1,600 voters selected Veronica Bratton, Marty Misjuns and Larry Taylor from a list of ten candidates as the Republican nominees for open Lynchburg City Council seats. Last week, the Republican Party of Virginia received the three appeals objecting to the process. This week, State Attorney General Jay Jones launched a review of the nomination process, saying in a letter it “may have violated state law.”
The firehouse primary was the first of its kind under a new state law that favors, but doesn’t explicitly require, state-run primaries and sparked conversations of party division as it was planned and executed.
On June 2, the local party certified the results of the firehouse primary and released in a statement that “the certification reflects both the will of the voters and the Committee’s commitment to transparency and accuracy.”
