There were many shocking aspects to the Republican Party of Virginia’s decision to throw out the results of the Lynchburg unit’s “firehouse primary” that nominated — for a time, anyway — three candidates to the city council.
The vote nullified. The party’s Lynchburg committee disbanded. A former city council member (Jeff Helgeson) formally suspended from party activities. A current city council member (Marty Misjuns) told to leave the meeting for being disruptive.
The shockwaves from all that will reverberate through Lynchburg politics for a long time yet; nobody thinks the Republican State Central Committee’s decisive 55-17 vote will end the blood feud between two rival factions of Lynchburg Republicans.
There’s one aspect of what happened Saturday that deserves more attention — and some clarification and context.
The majority report from the party’s appeals committee revealed that some participants in the party’s May 30 nominating event voted by email. The appeals committee considered this so significant that it put that point in bold type. It referred to “irregular provisional balloting procedures, voting via email, disenfranchisement of military members, intimidation of voters, improper submission of election forms, and a myriad of questionable actions,” all of which the appeals committee found at odds with the values of “the party that is supposed to defend election integrity.”
Lynchburg council member Chris Faraldi, who was not on the ballot in that firehouse primary but had urged the state party to toss the results, sent out an email blast Saturday praising the action and noting: “The appeal process itself revealed many astonishing facts, including facts nearly nobody was previously aware of … including the acceptance of ballots VIA E-MAIL!”
The bold, italics and capitalization are his, not mine.
The point here is that while Republicans in general have been resistant to things like early voting and mail voting, Lynchburg Republicans went a step further than even many Democrats want to go and allowed voting by email.
That is shocking.
Now, for the context.
This involved only two ballots — or maybe just one.
The reason that the Lynchburg nominating event is significant statewide is that Republicans there were trying to find a way around a recent state law — popularly known as Helmer’s Law, after the sponsor, Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax County — that all but requires state-run primaries for general election nominations. (Parties can still use party-run processes for special elections, which is why Montgomery County Republicans face no problem in holding a firehouse primary on June 20 to pick a candidate for sheriff in a special election.) Helmer’s Law says that any party-run processes must mimic the rules that the state has for making sure certain types of voters — such as military personnel — get a chance to vote in party nominations. For a state-run primary, there’s absentee voting. And that’s what Lynchburg Republicans tried to set up here.
“There were two individuals — overseas — who requested ballots by email,” state party chair Jeff Ryer said by text message. “Both were accommodated, but only one was returned.”
Obviously, that one ballot did not make the difference, but for some Republicans, the acceptance of any online ballots constituted a crossing of the Rubicon. President Donald Trump doesn’t even like voting by mail (even though it would probably help his party produce more votes out of rural areas, which notoriously have low turnout rates); it’s hard to imagine he’d countenance voting by email, even if the motive here had good intentions.
Now, as Paul Harvey liked to say, here’s the rest of the story.
Half our states — 25, if you need a reminder — allow certain voters to cast ballots online.
The federal Military and Overseas Voters Act, passed in 2009, requires states to allow voters who are overseas to request ballots by email. States aren’t required to accept those ballots by email, but 13 do. (Virginia is not among them.)
Meanwhile, the National Conference of State Legislatures says that 17 states now allow voters with disabilities to vote online, while five have added some other groups of voters eligible to vote online. Minnesota and New York allow emergency responders who are deployed “in any state of emergency” to vote online. Minnesota adds utility workers sent to work in such states of emergency. Colorado allows voters “with personal emergencies” to vote online. (Virginia allows online voting for those who are disabled; it’s unclear how many people actually do, though.) Alaska and Maryland allow any voter to cast ballots online. Texas has the most unusual online voting law: You can vote online if you’re in outer space.
The number of people who vote online seems small. Maryland’s 2024 election report didn’t break out the number of online votes, but its report on the 2022 primaries said 4.7% of the voters cast ballots electronically. Alaska provides a more detailed report. In the 2024 presidential election, the state accepted 8,309 ballots online — that’s 4.9% of the total cast in that year’s election.
It’s worth noting that Maryland and Alaska are diametrically opposed politically — the former a reliably blue state, the latter reliably red.
As someone who has had to change credit cards because scammers tried to use my account to go on a shopping spree for stereo equipment in Los Angeles, I have a hard time picturing widespread online voting, or any online voting, but it does happen.
Estonia — the country where Skype, the first big virtual meeting application, was invented — is considered the global leader in online voting. The 2001 elections in that Baltic state brought a new, innovative-minded government to power. One of those innovations was online voting. It was introduced in 2005 in local elections; only 1.9% of the voters took advantage of that option. However, its popularity grew, and come the 2023 parliamentary elections, most Estonian voters — 51.1% — cast their ballots online.
Canada, France, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates have also allowed online voting under certain circumstances. French citizens living abroad can vote online in presidential elections. Elections Canada, that country’s national elections agency, says “a number of Canadian municipalities” have used online voting in local elections but doesn’t define the number. These are mostly small localities in the provinces of Ontario and Nova Scotia, but they appear to have been enthusiastic adopters. A report on Nova Scotia found that 44 of that province’s 49 municipalities have voted online.
Brock University in St. Catherine’s, Ontario, has produced a report that says in 2022 there were 222 municipalities in Ontario that held elections online, with more expected to do so this year. A few Canadian municipalities have also added a telephone-voting option. (“Press 1 for the Liberal Party, Press 2 for the Conservative Party, Press 3 for the Green Party …”) In 2016, the town of Digby, Nova Scotia (population 2,000), had no paper ballots. You either voted online or by phone, or you didn’t vote at all.
It’s important to note that Canada has a distinctly different political climate from the United States (less polarized and more liberal), although it’s not always that different. Some provinces have banned internet voting for all the reasons you might expect.
The arguments for online voting are convenience — and assurance that online security methods can work. The arguments against are what you’d expect them to be — people just don’t trust things online.
That’s why even just a single vote cast online in Lynchburg Republicans’ nominating event wound up getting cited in bold lettering in the committee report.
I’ll have more on the Lynchburg situation (and lots of other things) in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. Sign up here:
