Virginia’s voided special election cost $11.6 million

We now know how much it cost Virginia to hold an election that didn’t count: $11.6 million.

Of that, the state will pick up $4.99 million, leaving localities to pay the balance of $6.6 million for the April 21 special election on redistricting that the Virginia Supreme Court later ruled was placed on the ballot unconstitutionally.

The numbers come from the Department of Elections, after Cardinal News filed a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request to find out the cost of the election.

I contacted localities small, medium and large and none said they’d have a particular problem paying their share. All said they’d already budgeted for primary elections that they expected in June. With the push to redraw Virginia’s congressional lines, those June primaries were bumped to August, putting them in a new fiscal year, so the money set aside for the June primaries was used to cover the special election on a proposed constitutional amendment to allow redistricting.

The issue some localities face now is that the Aug. 4 primary becomes an unexpected expense, although all said they’d figure out a way to pay for it. “We always budget for extra elections, so I think we will have money to cover this,” said Buckingham County administrator Karl Carter by email. It cost $44,373 to run the special election in his county. Of that, the state will pay $9,019, leaving the county to cover $35,353. (Each locality submits its expenses and the state calculates a reimbursement rate based on that.)

Other local government officials had similar things to say. The cost of running elections — paying for poll workers is one of the main expenses — depends largely on how big a locality is. Elections cost more in bigger localities, but they also have bigger budgets.

In Virginia Beach, the election cost $750,533. The state will pay $265,509, leaving the city to cover $465,023. City spokesperson Ali Weatherton-Shook said the city would save enough money through unfilled vacancies to cover unexpected election expenses.

In Chesterfield County, the election cost $619,970. The state will pay $223,356, leaving the county to cover $396,613. “Chesterfield tries to plan ahead for these growing demands,” said county spokesperson Stephen Bays. “In the county’s FY2027 budget, we added $630,000 to the Registrar’s budget to help fill the gap to cover the increasing costs of elections.”  

The most expensive locality was, not surprisingly, the state’s biggest: Fairfax County. It cost $1,545,781 to hold the election there. The state will pay $655,424, leaving the county to cover $910,356. “We allocated additional funds out of carryover to address not only the special election on the amendment but a number of special elections due to both elected officials winning other seats and elected officials that went into the administration,” said county supervisor Pat Herrity, a Republican.

The closest I came to finding a locality that felt pinched by the election cost was Dickenson County. “Unfortunately, moving the primary to August added a third election to our FY-27 budget, which was already very tight,” said Dickenson County administrator Larry Barton by email. (The other two are the fall general election and presumed primaries next June for the 2027 local and legislative elections.) It cost $39,748 to run the special election in Dickenson. Of that, the state will cover $7,802, leaving Dickenson to pay $31,946.

While officials in other localities, though, said they’d have no problem paying the expense, they also pointed out the obvious: Money is finite. “Any time you spend money it competes with critical services and/or increases the tax burden on our residents,” said Herrity, the Fairfax County supervisor.

And some said they’d welcome additional state funding. “Like many localities, Chesterfield would welcome additional state funding for special elections,” said Bays, the county spokesperson. “When state funding falls short, local dollars must fill the gap, leaving fewer resources for other priorities.”

The new state budget that the General Assembly just approved does include an additional $680,000 to help with the cost of three proposed constitutional amendments that will be on the November ballot, in addition to congressional elections and, in some places, local elections.

Since I’m writing this as an opinion column, I will go ahead and inject my opinion here: The Virginia Supreme Court could have avoided this. The court declined to rule on legal challenges to the special election before the vote, citing a 1912 court ruling involving a similar challenge to an upcoming constitutional amendment. In that case, the court held that it should only rule after the vote, on the grounds that passing a constitutional amendment is akin to passing a law — and just as a court won’t intervene until after the governor signs a bill, it shouldn’t intervene until after voters approve a constitutional amendment.

I’m not a legal scholar, but that seems sound reasoning except for one thing: When the Supreme Court let the disputed 1912 amendment vote go forward, it was part of an election that was going to happen anyway, the 1912 presidential election — so there was no additional expense incurred. In this case, the only reason the special election was happening — and so there was expense involved. The court’s adherence to that 1912 precedent cost Virginia $11,636,147.

Of course, some might also say that Virginia Democrats cost the taxpayers that amount by skirting the rules involved in placing an amendment on the ballot, although there was legal dispute over those rules. You’ll recall that the constitutional question turned on when an election legally begins. The constitution says that the legislature must pass an amendment twice, with an election in between. Democrats contended that passing the amendment the first time in a special session in late October satisfied that requirement, because it was ahead of the November general election. The court later ruled that, legally speaking, the election really began when early voting started in September, so Democrats had misread the legal calendar. Democrats could say that Republicans are ultimately to blame, because it was President Donald Trump and Texas Republicans who started the push to redraw congressional lines to “find” more Republican districts so Democratic-controlled states such as Virginia had no choice but to respond in kind to balance things out.

Whoever you choose to blame, we can now put a dollar figure to that attempt — 11.6 million of them.

For more on those upcoming Aug. 4 primaries (for which early voting is already underway), see our Voter Guide. For more political news and analysis, sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday afternoons.

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