Things weren’t official until the Electoral Board convened Thursday evening (Nov. 14) to certify it, but Arlington’s vote count for the 2024 election is now complete.
“At this point it’s really just double-checking everything,” county elections director Gretchen Reinemeyer said at the start of a post-election Electoral Board meeting held Wednesday (Nov. 13).
The results of local races were never in doubt once the first precincts began reporting the evening of Nov. 5. Provisional ballots changed the percentages slightly but not in a way that created any nail-biting scenarios.
JD Spain, Sr., was elected to succeed fellow Democrat Libby Garvey for County Board, while Zuraya Tapia-Hadley and Kathleen Clark rolled up big victories in the School Board race. They will succeed David Priddy and Cristina Diaz-Torres, who did not seek second terms.
By winning 58% of the vote, Spain was elected without Arlington needing to implement the ranked-choice voting procedure.
At the national level, Democrat Kamala Harris received 100,427 votes among the Arlington electorate, or 77.5%, according to data reported by the Virginia Department of Elections.
Donald Trump garnered 25,219, or 19.5%. The remaining votes were split among four other candidates; an additional 1,200 Arlington voters cast write-ins for the presidential race.
While still far behind Harris, Trump did improve his Arlington performance from the 2016 and 2020 races.
Democrats Sen. Tim Kaine and Rep. Don Beyer also ran well ahead of other candidates for federal offices. All five county bond referendums passed with large majorities.
The final 3-0 vote to certify the election results came Nov. 14 at 6:17 p.m., a day before the state deadline and the end of a very long election cycle.
“We’ve been voting for a third of the year,” said Electoral Board vice chair Dominick Schirripa. That counts the March presidential primaries, June state primaries and November general election.
Schirripa at the Nov. 14 canvass paid tribute to election office staff.
“Without them, all this doesn’t happen,” he said. “It’s been physically grueling.”
During the post-election “canvass” process, a few data-input errors were found, as is often the case. They were corrected and did not have a substantive impact on election results.
Arlington officials had spent much of the time in the post-Election Day period dealing with about 4,700 provisional ballots, which needed to be checked to ensure they met standards for acceptance.
Many of them came from same-day registrants, a relatively new phenomenon in Virginia elections — and a labor-intensive one that creates logistical challenges for voting officials.
“This is a huge burden on the election offices,” said Frank Lusby, a leader in Republican voter-integrity efforts in Arlington, at the Nov. 13 Electoral Board meeting.
Lusby said the fault lie with the state government, praising local election personnel for “a fantastic effort” and a cooperative attitude.
Arlington voter turnout was down, slightly, from 2020. Beyond that, Reinemeyer on Nov. 14 said she did not want to start parsing the details of the election.
“We are not doing any analysis — it is way too soon,” she said when one member of the public asked a question about what lessons could be gleaned.
A full after-action report is expected to be delivered to Electoral Board members and the public in January.
Falls Church Election Officials Wrap Up Tally Tuesday: In the neighboring city of Falls Church, election officials on Tuesday (Nov. 12) put the finishing touches on their election count.
“You don’t mind watching paint dry?” Electoral Board secretary Renee Andrews asked as two onlookers observed the process of evaluating 186 provisional ballots that had been cast by voters, many having used same-day registration on Election Day (Nov. 5) itself.
In the end, 176 were accepted and 10 rejected, the latter in some cases because applicants wrote down their street address but didn’t put an apartment number — something that is fine if one is already registered and casting an early ballot, but not OK if that voter is a same-day registrant on Election Day.
City election officials took note in hopes of not repeating the situation in future elections.
“We need to add that to instructions [given to officers of election] — that’s a training issue,” Andrews said.
A few provisional ballots were rejected because the voters lived just across the jurisdictional line in Fairfax County and were ineligible to cast ballots in Falls Church.
Once Falls Church Electoral Board members had approved the 176 provisionals, city registrar David Bjerke hand-fed them into a voting machine. Ten were kicked out as unreadable, leaving the three Electoral Board members to determine voter intent.
When all three agreed on all 10, those votes were added and, for all intents and purposes, Election 2024 was in the history books.
Among the nearly 12,000 Falls Church voters, about 79.5% went for Kamala Harris, 17.9% for Donald Trump. Democrats Tim Kaine and Don Beyer also received lopsided majorities, while in a special election for City Council, Laura Downs won 4,814 votes (58.5%) and John Murphy 3,339 (40.5%), with 83 write-ins.
In a special election for School Board, Anne Sherwood was unopposed and received 96.1% of the vote, with 276 voters writing in someone else.
