The lawsuit comes as GOP election skeptics, some parroting Donald Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, push for hand counting in other states.
RICHMOND -- Top Republican election officials in rural Waynesboro, Va., say they will refuse to certify the results of the Nov. 5 presidential election unless the city's ballots are counted by hand, alleging in a lawsuit that voting machines could be secretly programmed to rig the outcome.
Two members of the three-seat Board of Elections in Waynesboro, a small, red-leaning Shenandoah Valley city about 30 miles west of Charlottesville, contend in the suit that tallying ballots by machine amounts to counting them "in secret" -- something prohibited by the state constitution.
"The board members have taken an oath to uphold the Virginia Constitution, and the Virginia Constitution prohibits the counting of ballots in secret, so the board members do not believe that any election decided by voting machine total in the City of Waynesboro can be certified as accurate," the suit says.
"Yes, there are some that have blind faith in the machines," elections board Chairman Curtis G. Lilly II said in an email to The Washington Post on Monday. "And some that say Officers of Election already have enough to do, but this is the price of freedom!"
Lilly and Vice Chairman Scott Mares filed the suit Oct. 4 in Waynesboro Circuit Court. They are represented by Thomas F. Ranieri, a lawyer and member of the Warren County Republican Committee who volunteered as an elections observer in Pennsylvania in 2020 as President Donald Trump made false claims about election fraud in that state.
The board's refusal to sign off on Waynesboro's tally could delay the certification of statewide results in Virginia, where Vice President Kamala Harris has led Trump in recent polls. But elections experts said a judge could probably order the board to fulfill its duty to certify results in the city, which has a population of about 23,000. Trump won Waynesboro with 51 percent of the vote in 2020, even as Joe Biden carried Virginia as a whole by 10 points.
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The Waynesboro lawsuit comes as Republican election skeptics, some of them parroting Trump's baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, push for hand counting in other states, including Nevada and Georgia. The effort in Virginia drew fierce pushback from the lone Democrat on the Waynesboro board, Sharon Van Name. In an interview with The Post on Monday, she said the case fits a broader GOP "campaign to sow distrust in elections."
"I think Virginia is a model of free and fair elections," she said. "I think our system works very well, and the idea that a hand count will be more accurate than a machine count is absolutely ludicrous."
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has sent mixed messages on Trump's election fraud claims but also has publicly asserted that Virginia's voting system is secure.
Asked about the lawsuit, Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez referred questions to Attorney General Jason S. Miyares (R), whose own spokesman said Miyares could not comment on pending litigation. But Martinez also pointed to comments Youngkin made as he issued an executive order on election security in August.
"We use 100% paper ballots with a strict chain of custody. We use counting machines, not voting machines, that are tested prior to every election and never connected to the internet," the statement said.
"I trust our machines for all the reasons enumerated by Gov. Youngkin and the DOE," Virginia GOP Chairman Rich Anderson texted The Post, referring to the Department of Elections.
Virginia has a robust system for ensuring the accuracy of its elections, according to Jennifer Morrell, chief executive of the Elections Group, a Chicago-based nonpartisan organization that trains and supports elections officials on operations and administration.
The state conducts "accuracy and logic" testing of machines ahead of Election Day, a process Youngkin observed Tuesday morning in Chesterfield. After sample ballots are fed into every machine, observers from both parties compare the tally with the paper ballots to make sure the result is accurate. The machines are then locked and sealed until Election Day.
After the polls close, elections officials confirm that the total number of votes recorded on the machines matches the number of voters who checked in at each precinct. Finally, before the state certifies the vote, officials conduct a "risk-limiting audit," which involves a hand count of ballots from a certain area, chosen at random.
Hand counts are more expensive, time-consuming and inaccurate than machine-counted votes, according to a study by the Elections Group and States United Democracy Center.
"As human beings, we are just bad at repetitive, tedious work," Morrell said. "That's why we use computers and software to do all of this counting. ... I'm not at all saying we need to just implicitly trust voting equipment, but saying we're going leave our technology aside and use humans to count every race, every ballot is ridiculous."
As chairman of the Waynesboro board, Lilly is familiar with the system's checks and balances. Indeed, the lawsuit spells them all out. But the suit says a computer program crafted to rig the results still might slip through.
"Nobody knows what the programming is," said Lilly, a mechanical engineer. He contends that the state's election laws and procedures put him in a bind: He is required as a board member to vouch for the results, but he claims he will not know if they are accurate without counting the ballots himself.
"I'm supposed to say, 'Yeah, this was a fair election and this was the vote count,' but I can't verify that," he said.
Ranieri stressed that he is not accusing either party of election fraud. "I don't know that there is cheating, but I also don't know that there isn't, and the fact that I don't know there isn't is the cause of my concern," he said.
Lilly has been certifying machine-counted elections ever since he joined the board in June 2022. He said that concerns about election integrity were what led him to volunteer for the post but that he did not have a way to challenge the system until Ranieri proposed suing with a novel legal argument: that machine counting amounts to counting votes in secret.
"I wanted to be part of the process to see it from the inside out," Lilly said. "And right now the only thing I can't see is the inside of that machine."