While city councils, boards of supervisors and school boards are often the focus of local elections, there are a handful of full-time jobs on the ballot that keep city and county services running.
They’re called constitutional officers, and several of the positions are up for election in Hampton Roads this November. Here’s what they do:
Sheriff
This job functions differently depending if the person is serving a city or county.
In cities with police departments, the sheriff oversees operations at the city jail, as well as managing security at the city’s courthouse. Sheriff’s deputies, who are employees of the Sheriff, are also responsible for moving defendants from the jail to court hearings and back.
But in counties without a dedicated police force, the sheriff effectively acts as an elected police chief in addition to the jail and courthouse duties. Deputies in these communities do everything that would be handled by police officers in larger cities, including patrolling the streets, investigating crimes and making arrests.
Commissioner of Revenue and the Treasurer
These two jobs work hand-in-hand on local taxes.
A Commissioner of Revenue determines how much a person or business owes.
Then, the Treasurer collects those taxes.
Neither office makes tax laws or sets tax rates. That’s done by legislators, including city council or county board members.
Commonwealth’s Attorney
Known as a district attorney in most places outside Virginia, the Commonwealth’s Attorney is the local prosecutor.
They run an office of lawyers who represent the state when someone is arrested and charged by police.
Why do primary elections matter
For many of these local offices, the primary election is effectively the election.
Primaries are elections held within political parties before the general election in November to determine which candidate will represent a party. Primaries don’t have to happen and they don’t have to go to a ballot.
Many constitutional races in Hampton Roads don’t have candidates for both parties running in the general election.
In places where one party has overwhelming support, whoever secures the prevailing party’s endorsement usually gets the win in the general election.
Isle of Wight County, for example, skews so heavily Republican it hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election in more than 40 years. Whoever wins a primary in a party stronghold like that likely has an easy win come November
But party politics can still be competitive, like in Norfolk’s race for Commonwealth's Attorney.
Incumbent Ramin Fatehi branded himself as a progressive prosecutor when he beat out two others to secure the Democratic nomination in 2021. He said he wants to reform the justice system and is more interested in getting defendants rehabilitation or treatment than “the hammer” when appropriate.
“The measure of a successful prosecutor's office is not how many people we put in prison. It is whether we are putting the right people in prison for the right amount of time,” Fatehi told WHRO this month.
No Republican candidate filed to run for the seat in 2021 and Fatehi waltzed into office with nearly 96% of the vote in the general election that year.
But when crime spiked in the city in 2022, Mayor Kenny Alexander and others publicly criticized Fatehi’s approach and called for a more strident philosophy on prosecution.
As a result of the rift, former federal prosecutor John Butler is challenging Fatehi for the Democratic nomination this year. Butler told WHRO he’s not a “law and order” candidate and believes in criminal justice reform, but contends the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s focus should be to “enforce the law.”
“I see a basic lack of accountability that he's just not doing the core function of the job, and he's doing it in a way, I think, because he's so bent on the restorative justice component,” Butler told WHRO.
Butler is backed politically and financially by many of the city’s Democratic leaders, including Alexander, Sheriff Joe Baron and Treasurer Daun Hester.
Fatehi, meanwhile, has boasted support from Democrats at higher levels of government, though he hasn’t gotten the kind of financial backing Butler has. High-profile progressives like long-time Congressman Bobby Scott and Virginia Speaker of the House Don Scott, no relation, both recently endorsed Fatehi.
He said criticisms about his handling of prosecutions don’t hold up to statistical scrutiny — crime is down in the city over the past two years.
“The data shows that I've been able to implement criminal justice reforms while crime has fallen in Norfolk. This is the definition of success,” Fatehi said.
Fatehi has changed how Norfolk pursues court debt, eliminating recovery fees charged by private debt collectors. His office has allowed some defendants to plead crimes like larcenies under a certain dollar limit down to misdemeanors from felonies in order to help them avoid a felony record.
