A small staff is working overtime in Radford to process a flood of provisional ballots.
Radford saw 468 people register and cast their vote on Election Day, on top of another 58 people who registered at an early voting location. The total of same-day registrations was about 9% of the total number of ballots cast in the city.
That’s a similar number of provisional ballots as Fauquier County, which has six times the number of registered voters.
Virginia allows residents to register in-person and vote on a provisional ballot once the deadline to register to vote has passed. Same-day registration was approved by the General Assembly and began in fall 2022. Provisional ballots can’t be processed by vote counting machines until the local electoral board approves them.
It’s a volume Director of Elections and General Registrar Lindsey Williams wasn’t expecting, she said Thursday.
The city had 444 people register to vote between January and October, then saw more than that in a single day on Tuesday. Last fall, the city only had 35 same-day registrations; in November 2022, there were only about 40.
Now, she and her team of one full-time deputy registrar and one part-time registrar — plus a temporary part-time registrar sworn in this week — are working to complete the process of logging registrations and ballots.
Williams’ office has until Monday evening to process all 500-plus same-day registrations, double-checking that each was filled out correctly and inputting voter information into the online state system one by one. The state elections department will cross-reference each one to see whether anyone voted twice.
Starting at 10 a.m. on Nov. 13, the Electoral Board will review each same-day ballot that was logged and verify registration is complete. Each ballot will then finally be scanned into the voting machine and counted.
The registrar’s office must also manually record voter credit, logging that each of those newly registered voters cast a ballot.
Williams reserved space at the Radford courthouse on Nov. 13 and 14 for the Electoral Board and hopes the process will be done by the end of the second day. Court is in session on Friday, she said, and there’s no space to spare at the small courthouse.
Nov. 15 is the deadline for localities to report to the state Board of Elections.
Along with voting for candidates for president, U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives, Radford voted for two city council members and two school board members.
The results of the school board race are up in the air due to the number of provisional ballots. Amanda Winter is ahead of Ben Buzzard for the second available school board seat by only 27 votes.
Williams’ office sent 125 provisional envelopes to each of the city’s four precincts, thinking it would be enough for the entire day. But two of the city’s precincts heavily populated by Radford University students saw high volumes of those college students arriving to register and vote.
At Grove United Methodist Church, the polling place for the New River precinct, election workers set up chairs for students who were waiting to register and vote — at 6 p.m., there was a line out the door and onto the sidewalk. Elections workers advised those lined up that it could take as long as 90 minutes to go through the process of registering and voting.
When someone wanted to register and vote on Election Day, poll workers needed to call the registrar’s office, verify whether the person was already registered and look up their address to make sure they were at the correct precinct. Some streets in Radford run straight through campus, Williams said, with their voting precinct coming down to their house number; if a student registered in the wrong precinct, their vote couldn’t be counted.
The registrars will work on Saturday to process registrations by Monday at 5 p.m. before the marathon session with the electoral board later in the week. Williams said the season has been tough on her staff. “Forty-five days of early voting and then this on the back end — it’s too much,” she said. She said she and her staff haven’t had a day off since Oct. 27.
During its 2024 session, the General Assembly approved an extra three days for electoral boards to review provisional ballots, for a total of 10; prior to July 1, electoral boards only had 7 days after Election Day to review them.
In small localities seeing an influx of same-day registrants, that extension may not be enough to get the job done.
“If same-day registration is here to stay, we need more time to process” in the post-election part of the cycle, Williams said.
Updated 8:58 a.m. to correct a reference to same-day registration as a subset of provisional ballots.
