After an election recount on Thursday, incumbent Jackie Lohr maintained her victory in the Rockingham County School Board race for the District 1 seat. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
When all the ballots were recounted, 17 votes separated challenger Ernest Calhoun from incumbent Jackie Lohr. He picked up three votes from the initial results, and Lohr picked up two – for a final count of 3,137 votes for Calhoun and 3,154 for Lohr.
The recount was held at the county government building, and overseen by three state court judges from around Virginia. Sixteen recount officials paired up at eight stations – six with ballot scanning machines, and two for hand-counting ballots. All the recount officials have worked elections before, and went through an extra day of training before the recount. On Wednesday, they gathered to sort out the District 1 ballots from the rest of the county's. Then, on Thursday, each scanning station opened one box of ballots at a time and fed them through the machine to be counted. If a ballot was rejected by the machine for any reason, it was gathered in an envelope and passed to one of the hand-counting stations.
The room was busy with both candidates and volunteer observers watching the action, and electoral board members and registrar staff answering questions.
MADDIE PALADINO: I thought that both days went really well. The product of this shows how well we do our jobs. So I'm pretty proud of all of our election officers and how we had everything put together.
EMILY HELMS: It went super smooth both days, and the confidence that we have now in the process is what, ultimately, the public should know from this.
Maddie Paladino and Emily Helms are the deputy director and chief deputy director of elections, respectively. Earlier this month, they traveled to Fluvanna County to observe their election recount for a school board race.
PALADINO: It was pretty interesting, I would say, and it prepared us really well to have this run so smoothly.
HELMS: We had specific hand-count teams that would make sure that the process was utilized correctly, where their scanning officers would also do the hand-counting.
The vast majority of the ballots sent to the hand-counting stations had been filled out for the statewide races but not the school board race. There were also some with candidates written in and a handful that appeared to be filled out entirely and correctly, but paper dust from being scanned again prevented the machine from reading them.
The few votes that made the count slightly different from the initial results were cases where the ballot wasn't filled out in a way the machine could read, but both recount officials agreed on what the voter's intent was. For example – one was filled out clearly, but in red pen. On another, someone had filled in the bubble next to "write-in," did not write in a name, crossed out the write-in bubble, and then filled in the bubble for one of the candidates. Another person used an "X" to mark each of their choices on the ballot. If the two officials had disagreed on the voter's intent, that ballot would have gone to the three judges for a decision, but that didn't happen on Thursday.
Once the votes were tallied and the math double-checked and certified by the judges, the Clerk of Circuit Court Chaz Haywood swore in Jackie Lohr for her third term.
Her priorities are addressing behavioral issues in the schools, updating the school bus fleet, and planning the future of the Massanutten Technical Center. As the Harrisonburg Citizen previously reported, the city school district decided to withdraw from the technical center earlier this year after months of conflict with the county.
I asked Lohr what she thought about the race being so close.
JACKIE LOHR: I don't know what to say about that. I do feel like, in the campaign there were some things that were just not true, that were said about me. … I am a person who wants to do great things for kids. … At the end of the day, I'm also a farmer, and I don't want to spend a whole lot of money, so I want to be very careful with the funding, so that comes into play for me as well. So it's really hard to put me in a box of Democrat or Republican. I am neither, and I just want to do great things for kids, and I don't feel like I was always portrayed that way to the voters.
Calhoun said if he had been elected, he wanted to make education more fun and individualized, and give kids the help they need even if they don't qualify for certain services by state or federal standards. I asked him about a Facebook post he made after the initial results were announced, where he wrote "truth lost to delusion." It summed up his position on transgender kids' identities.
ERNEST CALHOUN: I think sometimes people want to be nice to people and don't want to tell them the truth. … You know, God designed it: two sexes. It's not going to change. It's an eternal truth, and it's unfortunate we can't just help the kids understand that. Instead, we encourage them to do the wrong thing, and that's very disappointing.
As for the election results, both candidates agreed that the recount process was conducted well.
CALHOUN: So the overall recount was great. The only concern I really had was … over 400 people didn't vote for the local, and they voted for the state elections. I think people need to realize that their local elections are just as important.
LOHR: I just want to say "thank you" to the registrar's office and the court system. … I was very impressed with the professionality that they had, and the system and the method of counting.
County officials said this is only the third recount they've done in the last 20 years, and the other two were for statewide races – both for the attorney general in 2005 and 2013.
