An election sign at the Bedford Hills precinct in Lynchburg. Photo by Matt Busse.
An election sign at the Bedford Hills precinct in Lynchburg. Photo by Matt Busse.

In less than three weeks, Virginians will start voting.

With early voting, Election Day is now more like Election Season. Early voting begins Sept. 20.

This year Virginians will vote not only for president, they’ll elect a U.S. senator, members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and, in many places, local officials – mayors, council members and school board members. 

Across Cardinal’s coverage area in Southwest and Southside Virginia, there are more than 500 candidates for office — and this is, by Virginia standards, something of an off-year election in terms of the number of candidates.

This year will also mark the first time that some municipalities will be holding elections in November, rather than in May. Virginia made that change to increase participation in those elections. When Roanoke moved from spring to fall a few years ago, voter participation in the mayoral race increased more than six-fold. That means a lot of people will be voting this fall for offices they never have before.

Cardinal News takes seriously its role to provide independently gathered information to help voters assess candidates. This year, we are increasing our efforts to ask all candidates for office in Southwest and Southside Virginia to participate in our voter guide. We will also hold a series of candidate forums in contested city races.

In addition to our regular daily news coverage, Cardinal News has created a resource for you to visit and return to over the coming months.

A revamped Voter Guide

We’ve had an online Voter Guide before that answers questions about how to register, deadlines for various forms of voting, or where to find your Election Day voting place. We’re about to beef that up. 

We’ve partnered with the Knight Election Hub to create locality-by-locality pages where you can look up your specific locality and find out who’s on the ballot.  The Knight Election Hub is a project of the Knight Foundation, which was founded in 1950 by the Ohio family whose newspapers later became part of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. The foundation’s election hub is providing free election-related services to nonprofit news sites and small for-profit news sites across the country. For Cardinal, this has meant a contractor to help build those Voter Guide pages as well as a software platform called ElectUp that lets us create questionnaires for the candidates — and display their answers side by side. We also received a $3,000 grant from Microsoft to help us manage the technical end of those questionnaires. 

We have invited all candidates in Southwest and Southside Virginia to fill out a questionnaire and upload information to the guide. For the congressional races, we’ve expanded this to all 11 congressional districts across the state. While we concentrate coverage on our regions, we recognize that many Virginians live in places underserved by media and are aiming to provide this resource to them. 

We’ve sent invitations to all candidates at the email addresses on file with the State Board of Elections. If you’re a candidate and did not receive this email, or now have a different email address, please contact us at elections@cardinalnews.org.

We launched the revamped Voter Guide late last week and will add in the ElectUp questionnaires over the coming week. We’ll let you know as we add key information. If you’re not a regular reader, the best way to keep up with this is to sign up for our free daily newsletter, download our free app from your app store, or bookmark our Voter Guide. Please let your friends know, as well.

Candidate forums

You can now sign up to attend one of our candidate forums that we will be hosting in some of the contested local races. While attendance is free, registration is required due to limited seating. 

Here’s the schedule with links on how to register:

Election results

We hope voters will return on Election Day to learn the outcome of races in Virginia. In addition to our reporters’ coverage of key races, thanks to our membership in the Institute for Nonprofit News and LION Publishers, we’re able to offer live results on election night from Associated Press. We tried out this feed earlier this year during the March presidential primary and the June congressional primaries.