Virginia Beach expects flood of absentee ballots
Officials have ramped up their strategies for processing votes
VIRGINIA BEACH — At 10 a.m. Friday, the first absentee vote in Virginia Beach officially was cast. This kicked off an unprecedented election year in which officials expect to count more absentee ballots than ever. To prepare, Virginia Beach election officials have ramped up their strategies for processing votes ahead of Election Day.
According to state law, election officials can begin processing absentee ballots before Nov. 3, as long as the vote totals are not tallied until Election Day. The first pre-processing session began Friday morning in the Department of Voter Registration & Elections and was scheduled to last until 6 p.m. They aimed to process 4,600 votes.
Two members of the city’s Electoral Board, Tim Barrow and Chairman Jeffrey Marks, said these pre-processing sessions will dramatically decrease the time it takes to count votes on Election Day. In these sessions, ballots are run through processing machines that tally the vote internally, but don’t spit out totals.
Such sessions are not new — Barrow said they’ve usually held one or two in past elections — but have been scaled up this year to meet the massive increase in mail-in absentee ballots. They have already received 50,000 absentee votes, and are expecting another 50,000 in coming weeks.
That would mean almost a third of Virginia Beach’s 313,000 registered voters casting absentee ballots, compared to less than 10% — about 30,000 people — in the 2016 presidential election.
While the Electoral Board meets Wednesday to set the schedule, Barrow said they anticipate needing at least one six-hour session a week until the election.
Other cities and counties plan similar scanning ahead of Election Day. In Chesapeake, the process will begin after Oct. 13, according to registrar Mary Lynn A. Pinkerman. Norfolk will begin pre-processing after the Oct. 13 deadline for voter registration has passed. York County registrar
Walter Latham Jr. said his office will begin pre-processing Monday. Williamsburg will have four sessions on Oct. 20, 22, 27 and 29, city spokeswoman Nicole Trifone said. Hampton registrar Tara Morgan said the city will begin its pre-processing at “the end of next week” — she did not specify which day.
Registrar Dianna Moorman said pre-processing isn’t new to James City County either. It was used in June and has been used in past presidential elections. This year, the pre-processing will start in early October but the dates were not released publicly as of Friday afternoon.
“Because the new standard of no-excuse absentee voting has started we will do pre-processing from this point forward for all elections,” Moorman said during a Thursday question and answer session.
With so much being said about mail-in voting— President Donald Trump has tweeted that absentee ballots are open to “interference” by foreign countries and will cause “chaos” — Virginia Beach
officials have strived to be open about how absentee ballots are being counted.
“It’s very discouraging sometimes to see the process being disparaged when so much is committed to making this thing work,” Barrow said. “We make every effort to make this as transparent as possible.”
City officials invited candidates and press to observe the first day of pre-processing. The schedule for future scanning will be made public and candidates will be invited again.
Although these sessions will decrease the time it takes to tally the votes on Nov. 3, Marks emphasized they will not receive all the mail-in votes until noon on Nov. 6. Barrow added that they cannot fully predict how many absentee ballots they will receive, and an unexpected “surge” in votes could put them behind schedule.
But, with 1,500 volunteers, Marks said the election this year is a community effort and that everyone is determined to “get it right.”
“Everyone should be really confident that their vote is going to be counted and that this will be a fair and accurate election,” he said.