{"id":179593,"date":"2017-12-22T18:44:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T23:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/12\/22\/not-a-one-vote-margin\/"},"modified":"2017-12-22T18:44:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-22T23:44:00","slug":"not-a-one-vote-margin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/12\/22\/not-a-one-vote-margin\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a One Vote Margin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a protest from the Republican, the election in Virginia&#8217;s 94<sup>th<\/sup> House of Delegates District <a href=\"http:\/\/www.richmond.com\/news\/virginia\/government-politics\/virginia-elections-board-to-pick-random-winner-in-tied-house\/article_203dc6b1-0cb6-5027-bc22-10b4ebfad10d.html\">is a tie that will be settled by a coin flip<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">An apparent one-vote Democratic victory in a Newport News-area House of Delegates race turned into a tie Wednesday, creating an unprecedented scenario in which control of the House will be decided by state officials essentially drawing a name out of a hat.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Under state law, the State Board of Elections now has to break the tie in the 94th House District through \u201cdetermination by lot,\u201d the wildest turn yet after a roller-coaster week in Virginia politics.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Republican Del. David E. Yancey entered Tuesday\u2019s recount with a 10-vote lead over Democrat Shelly Simonds. At the end of the recount, Simonds appeared to have a one-vote lead over Yancey, which would have created a 50-50 split in the House after Democrats flipped 15 other GOP-held seats in a wave election last month.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Republicans indicated Tuesday evening that they wouldn\u2019t challenge the outcome when it went before a three-judge panel for final approval.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">But on Wednesday morning, Yancey\u2019s campaign asked the court to accept a ballot that had been tossed aside. The voter had filled in bubbles for both Yancey and Simonds, but had put a slash through the Simonds bubble, which the court interpreted as intent to vote for Yancey. On the same ballot, the voter had made an X on the filled-in bubble beside the name of Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. The ballot included clear votes for Republicans in the races for attorney general and lieutenant governor.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The additional vote for Yancey meant each candidate finished with 11,608 votes. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There may be more litigation to follow.<\/p>\n<p>Bummer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a protest from the Republican, the election in Virginia&#8217;s 94th House of Delegates District is a tie that will be settled by a coin flip: An apparent one-vote Democratic victory in a Newport News-area House of Delegates race turned into a tie Wednesday, creating an unprecedented scenario in which control of the House will &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[375,407,374],"class_list":["post-179593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-elections","tag-justice","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179593"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}