POLITICS: Outcome of 5th District GOP primary unchanged after further review of ballots

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., joins Virginia Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland, in Louisa County on June 5, 2024 to support his bid to represent Virginia’s 5th Congressional District. (Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)

State Sen. John McGuire, R-Goochland, remains the winner in a highly contested GOP primary in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, following an unexpected additional review of ballots from five of the district’s 24 localities almost one month after a full recount that did not significantly change the outcome of the election. 

Working with the registrars from Amherst, Cumberland, Halifax and Mecklenburg Counties and the city of Danville, who had been summoned to the Goochland County Circuit Court Wednesday afternoon, a three-judge panel corrected some minor reporting errors that resulted in incumbent U.S. Rep. Bob Good, R-Farmville, picking up four more votes, bringing down McGuire’s winning margin down to 366 votes.  

The court also reviewed a petition filed by Good’s attorney Brad Marss objecting to some of the recount-related expenses billed to the congressman’s campaign. The court agreed to some of the objections, resulting in a reduction of the total cost from $104,000 to $88,918 — less than the $96,500 that Goochland’s Chief Judge Claude Worrell, who headed the recount panel, had estimated at a preliminary hearing in July. 

“We’ve reviewed, and reviewed, and reviewed,” Worrell said at the conclusion of Wednesday’s hearing. “We asked the representatives of the different areas to come in to show us what we were looking at, but in the end it got a little bit more complicated than that.”

During their review the judges identified some reporting methods by the registrars that differed slightly from the court’s initial instructions, resulting in numbers that didn’t line up correctly with the final tally. But the differences were too small to impact the outcome of the recount or the election overall. 

Jason Corwin, the general registrar in Mecklenburg County, said in a phone interview earlier this week that his staff discovered several minor math errors made during the recount in two of the county’s 22 precincts. 

“When we took the original recount certification sheet, we put down a couple of wrong numbers. One was 36 and should have been 37, and one was for early voting where we put down 283 and 128, and they were both off by one vote,” Corwin said in the interview.

Good’s campaign  filed a petition for a district-wide recount eight days after the election was certified by the State Board of Elections in early July. The chairman of the powerful House Freedom Caucus told supporters in an email at the time that he was seeking a “complete recount,” including a hand-count and paper ballot match to the reported machine results.

Bernard Goodwyn, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, then appointed the three-panel recount court, consisting of Worrell, Judge J. Christopher Clemens of Salem and Judge Christopher Papile of Newport News. Initially, Worrell ordered the recount for July 31, but later pushed it back by a day due to scheduling conflicts. 

Before the recount, McGuire’s lead over Good was 0.6%, which put the incumbent within the 1% margin allowing him to request a recount at his campaign’s expense, but above the 0.5% threshold that would require localities to pay for it. 

Candidate-funded recounts are rare in Virginia, because of the high cost and because they rarely change the outcome of elections. And after the court reviewed the recounted election returns that election officials from across the district had delivered to the Goochland County Circuit Court on Aug. 1, Good picked up a mere four votes, bringing down McGuire’s winning margin to 370 and effectively ending Good’s bid for a third term in office. 

The court on Wednesday agreed to honor some, but not all, of Good’s objections to the cost assessed by the court in the days after the recount. For example, it sustained a motion by Marss to toss out a $2,800 bill by Lunenburg County for its county attorney, agreeing that this expense was “undocumented” and not “reasonably necessary to the proceedings.”

But the court ruled other expenses billed by the localities as justified, including mileage and other travel expenses filed by election officials and sheriff’s deputies, who escorted registrars carrying ballots to Goochland on Aug. 1. The court also kept in place its order that Good’s campaign pay for meals and catering expenses incurred by election workers during the process. 

Speaking with reporters inside the courtroom on Wednesday, Marss — Good’s attorney — said that the court’s decision to hold another hearing weeks after the conclusion of the recount was highly unusual.

“Having a hearing like this one I haven’t heard of before,” Marss said. “I consider it unfortunate that it happened that way. Had it not been for the discrepancies from the localities, this would have not been done in a hearing but by way of written memos.”

Good said in a text message after the hearing that his campaign will pay the cost determined by the court as required within 21 days. He also thanked the court for correcting the irregularities in the final tally.

“I appreciate the efforts of the judges to address some mistakes that had been identified after the recount,” Good said.

 

Sean Brown, a McGuire spokesman, said that the changes that the court reviewed Wednesday were “all clerical errors” by either the registrars or the court on recount day. 

“The court sustained Good’s objections to costs for the Lunenburg County Attorney, Albemarle Clerk, and sheriff’s deputies. The court said that since it considered the recount to be a court proceeding, those costs shouldn’t be imposed on the parties. The court overruled all of his other objections,” Brown said. 

McGuire, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump three weeks before the primary election, had made his campaign a referendum on which candidate is a more loyal supporter of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Trump’s support likely helped push him over the edge — McGuire won the election by a mere 374 votes out of 62,792 cast.

Within days of losing the recount, Good squashed persistent rumors that he would be seeking the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in Virginia by filing a formal “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Election Commission declaring that he will once again run in the 5th District in the 2026 election.