If you ask Susan Beals, you don’t have to go too far back to find evidence that Virginia’s elections are secure and accurate.
Just last week, a recount of the GOP primary in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District confirmed state Sen. John McGuire’s victory over incumbent Rep. Bob Good, R-Farmville.
After election officials in the district’s 24 localities recounted 62,802 ballots, they found that Good had picked up four votes, reducing McGuire’s winning margin to 370. The recount’s bottom line: The original count on election night was off by a mere 0.006% — a statistical fluke.
As the state’s top elections official, Beals monitored the recount closely from Richmond.
“The registrars who ran that recount did an amazing job. They were incredibly careful, along with their recount teams, to ensure that every vote was recounted,” Beals said in a recent interview. “The fact that they came out with the same result shows that voters can have confidence in elections in Virginia.”
Beals’ faith in Virginia’s electoral system contradicts a trend that has had election officials concerned since the most recent presidential election. A poll released earlier this year shows that about one-third of U.S. adults — mostly Republicans and Republican-leaning independents — say they believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president of the United States in 2020.
However, unlike in several other states, including Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania, there has never been widespread doubt about the integrity of Virginia’s elections. Beals attributes this to the fact that the commonwealth is just one of very few states that hold elections every year.
“That’s one of the things about Virginia that is unique, and the beauty of that is we have incredibly experienced election officials,” Beals said. “For me personally, every time I go through an election I learn something new, or I’m faced with a situation that I haven’t been faced with before, and now I can just add that to my arsenal. You’re dealing with people who really know what they are doing because they do it a lot.”
Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, said that last week’s recount for the 5th District Republican primary showed that Virginia election officials know how to count.
“The recount involved just a few votes — far, far less than the number needed to have reversed the outcome,” Farnsworth said. “For all the claims about election official misconduct and incompetence lodged in recent years, the legal challenges in state after state demonstrate the high level of professionalism and capacity of election officials when it comes to counting ballots.”
In her role as the state’s chief elections official, Beals and her staff oversee voter registration, absentee voting, ballot access for candidates, campaign finance disclosure and voting equipment certification, all in close coordination with each of Virginia’s 133 local election offices.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed Beals — at the time a member of the Chesterfield County Electoral Board — as Virginia’s commissioner of elections in March 2022, less than three months into his term. She replaced Chris Piper, who had held the position during Gov. Ralph Northam’s four-year tenure.
Beals’ appointment raised the ire of then-state Sen. Amanda Chase, R-Chesterfield County, for whom she had previously worked as a legislative aide. In a Facebook post, Chase said at the time that she was “deeply troubled and devastated” over the news, citing a meeting of the Chesterfield County GOP where Beals had denied that there had been any irregularities during the 2020 presidential election in Virginia. Beals had also refused to support a resolution calling for a full forensic audit that was being presented by members of the committee.
In the recent interview, Beals said that during her tenure as a local elections official from 2019 through 2021, she learned firsthand of the many safeguards put in place by state law to make sure that Virginia’s elections are secure.
“There are so many checks and balances in this process,” she said. “But we also have plans for every possible case that could come up, like what happens if there’s an issue and a voting machine gets jammed or if something happens in a precinct. That is what local election officials do, they plan for every possible scenario.”
Beals said that during her time on Chesterfield’s electoral board she often had to face voters concerned with the accuracy of Virginia’s elections, especially after conspiracy theories claiming that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election which Biden won by almost 8 million votes began spreading on social media.
“I’ve actually had the experience of someone that I know come to me and voice some serious concerns about what they thought was going on. And I encouraged them to become an officer of election,” Beals said.
“They did, and they called me back afterwards and said, ‘Thank you so much for asking me to do that. I served during the election, I saw all the processes that were in place to make sure that our elections are secure.’”
The former skeptic continues to serve as an officer of election to this day, Beals said. “And this past June, when I took my son to go vote for the first time, that person checked him in to vote. It was incredibly gratifying, because here’s this person who’s had questions. People are welcome to have questions, and we’re happy to provide answers.”
When conspiracy theories about voter fraud begin to circulate online, local officials working the polls often take the brunt of the scorn, as shown in Buckingham County, where in the aftermath of the 2020 election local Republicans began advancing baseless voter fraud claims against General Registrar Lindsey Taylor and her staff. After three years of bullying and threats, Taylor and three of her colleagues quit in March of last year.
“There were people saying that they had heard all these rumors — that the attorney general was going to indict me,” Taylor told NBC News shortly after her departure. “Mentally, I just — I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Beals understands Taylor’s frustration all too well.
“When I was in Chesterfield leading up to the 2020 election, that was a crazy time,” Beals said. “We were in a pandemic, and a lot of elections changed that year with the expansion of early voting. And there were a lot of new processes that people just didn’t understand.”
During those hectic months, Beals spent much time standing outside the local registrar’s office, answering questions and speaking to voters who had lined up to cast their ballots early.
“We’d have 1,000 people a day that would come vote early, and we’d answer questions, just helping people understand that there are processes in place for everything, and we’re happy to guide them through that. One of the things that I always go back to in my role is to make sure that the laws of the commonwealth related to elections are being followed in every election.”
Local officers of election often view their work as their patriotic duty, and many have been doing their jobs for years, sometimes decades, Beals said.
“They have seen the different fluctuations in political wins and how things have changed over the years, but they are very focused on doing their job, which is making sure that the people who come vote at that precinct have a smooth voting experience and that the results are reported in a timely manner.”
When people are checked in at their local precinct by the same neighbor for years, that provides many with the confidence “that these are friends and neighbors who are running the elections in the community.”
For that reason, the Department of Elections puts a lot of effort into training local officials, Beals added.
“One of the things that I think has been extremely effective is that some of these local officers have had open houses or inviting people to be officers of election, allowing them to experience it firsthand from the inside so they can see that massive amounts of paperwork that are involved and all the checks that go into putting on an election,” Beals said.
“That’s where the rubber hits the road when you are having those one-to-one conversations with people and taking the time to listen to them and answer their questions.”
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Misled by media coverage by conservative networks following the 2020 election, many voters believed that voting machines could be hacked. Last year, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the election.
Despite the settlement, conspiracy theories about voting machines continue to persist nationwide — including in Virginia, where every single voting machine is certified to state and federal standards before it can be used. State law prohibits voting machines in the commonwealth to be connected to the internet when they are in polling locations, which makes hacking impossible.
“Period. They cannot be,” Beals said.
Additionally, every piece of voting equipment is subject to trials before every election in what is called logic and accuracy testing.
“We take a voting machine that is going to be used on Election Day, we take a test deck of ballots for that particular election, and we mark those ballots,” Beals said. “We know what the result of that test deck should be, and then they run it through the machine to ensure that it is reading the ballot and reporting the results correctly for that election, with those people’s names on it.”
Just last week, local election officials in every locality of the 5th Congressional District used the same procedure to test their machines ahead of the recount in the GOP primary.
“That’s sort of the front-end check,” Beals said. “Then we have Election Day, and the results are reported, and then we have risk-eliminating audits, which is the back-end check. So we have three different checks throughout the system just to make sure that the machines are reporting accurately.”
Because the COVID-19 pandemic impacted virtually all aspects of American life, including the 2020 presidential election, many states and jurisdictions promoted the expanded use of mail-in ballots as a way to vote while avoiding the risk of infection in crowded polling locations.
After losing the election, Trump repeatedly decried voting by mail as an invitation for widespread fraud, though experts say there is almost no meaningful fraud associated with mail-in ballots. And unlike in some other states, Virginia doesn’t just send out absentee ballots — which include mail-in ballots and early in-person ballots — to voters who didn’t ask for one.
“One of the things that I have learned in this job is that there are states, particularly as you go further west, where it’s more sparse and more rural, that are all-mail states, and they will mail a ballot to every person on their voter rolls,” Beals said.
“In Virginia, we don’t do that. You have to request the absentee ballot in order to receive it, and once you mail it back, you also have to put your Social Security number and your date of birth on it before we will accept it back to count it. Those types of requirements that are in place make absentee voting pretty strict in Virginia.”
Absentee ballots are also tracked through every step of the process. “They have barcodes on them so the voter can see when the ballot has left the registrar’s office and track it on its way to their house, and they can track it back,” Beals said. “There are a lot of strict rules around chain of custody for ballots that ensure that the election is secure.”
For a ballot returned in a drop box to be counted, the local registrar must have a record of that ballot having been requested.
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A long-standing tradition of TV networks and news agencies calling the winner of a presidential election before midnight after the polls close has also been abandoned in more recent cycles, providing more oxygen for conspiracy theories to flourish as the country awaits the results. For example, in 2020 Biden did not have the needed electoral votes to win the presidency until four days after the election, as the count of mail-in ballots continued into the weekend.
Beals cautioned to not take early predictions by the networks at face value — especially in Virginia, where several safeguards can delay the certification of an election. “All election results are unofficial until they are certified,” she said.
The morning after the election, every local electoral board across the commonwealth meets for a second check of the results, reviewing the results tapes from every precinct and matching them against the statement of results that issued by that precinct.
“They compare it to what was put into our election night results to make sure that everything matches and nothing was fat-fingered. Then they send the results to the state, and we do a third check. So doing all these checks to ensure that the results are accurate takes time, and is why we don’t say that the results are official until they are certified.”
Beals also pointed out that election law in Virginia continues to evolve. For example, mail-in ballots must now be accepted until noon on the Friday after the election as long as they were postmarked on or before Election Day.
Some states have laws that absentee ballots cannot be processed until Election Day, which puts them at a disadvantage, Beals believes. “In Virginia, we allow for the pre-processing of absentee ballots, so election officials can start meeting before election day,” she said. “By doing all that work on the front end, you can show your results a lot sooner on election night.”
While voting by people who are not U.S. citizens is already illegal in federal elections, this issue has become a leading talking point for Republicans since 2020, despite the lack of evidence that it is happening anywhere in significant numbers — including in Virginia.
People who are undocumented might apply for a driver privilege card in the commonwealth, but they are not given the opportunity to register to vote when they go to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Anybody who comes to the DMV and shows documents that indicate they are a non-citizen — whether it is a visa or residency — their name is sent to the Department of Elections on a monthly basis so we can double check to make sure that they did not make their way on our voter rolls. If we find them on the rolls, we cancel them,” Beals said.
In an effort to keep the state’s voter rolls transparent and updated, since 2013 the Department of Elections has produced an annual maintenance report that shows any changes.
“It’s basically a recap of all the things that we did throughout the course of the year to update our voter rolls, like how many felons, non-citizens or dead people were removed,” Beals said.
For example, the 2023 maintenance report — the most recent one available — shows that by Aug. 31 of last year, a total of 6,095,707 individuals were registered to vote in Virginia. During this reporting period, 294,572 new voters registered, and 234,736 registrations were canceled after following the various processes for voter registration list maintenance, including 17,368 felons and 77,348 deceased voters.
A 2017 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the rate of voting fraud overall in the U.S. is less than 0.0009%. The Virginia Department of Elections does not maintain a database for attempted voter fraud.
“Anything that we find related to suspicion of voter fraud we turn over to the Office of the Attorney General for them to investigate,” Beals said.
In 2022, Attorney General Jason Miyares established an Election Integrity Unit to provide legal advice to the Department of Elections, investigate and prosecute violations of Virginia election law, work with the election community throughout the year to ensure uniformity and legality in application of election laws, and work with law enforcement “to ensure legality and purity” in elections, according to a press release.
A spokeswoman for the Office of the Attorney General on Tuesday declined to provide data relating to voter fraud, citing attorney-client privilege. But Miyares said when the unit was announced that it would “work to help to restore confidence in our democratic process in the commonwealth.”
Beals, however, encourages Virginians to vote in the 2024 presidential election with trust in the process and in the accuracy of the results.
“Once you vote in Virginia, your results are checked three times before the results are certified. Between that and the efforts at security of voting machines, security and custody of ballots, and the training that we provide to our election officials, I believe that Virginians can be confident in our elections,” Beals said.
