This story was reported and written by Radio IQ.
When Virginia Democrats controlled the state’s legislature and governor’s mansion four years ago one of their top concerns was expanding access to the ballot. Changes made to the state’s election system were numerous, but the impacts from those changes may be different than many assume.
“The citizens of Virginia should be confident their votes will be counted accurately, and the elections are fair,” Governor Glenn Youngkin told the press earlier this month, reassuring the public about Virginia’s election system ahead of the 2024 Presidential race.
But those comments come years after Democrats overhauled ballot access in 2020 and 2021.
Loosened voter ID laws, no excuse absentee voting, easier mailed ballots, 45 days of early voting and the inclusion of overseas Virginians in primary elections are among the changes that are still rippling through the Commonwealth.
In recent years expanded voting access has been politicized with charges that it helps Democratic candidates. But Youngkin and other Republicans went on to win big in 2021, a year after many of those big changes were made.
According to Charles Stewart, Director of MIT’s Elections Lab, expanding early voting often doesn’t increase voter turnout on one side or the other, it just makes voting easier.
“For most people, politics is a sideshow, voting is a burden and for many of them, doing other things civically is a burden cause they’re just trying to get by and live their lives,” Stewart said.
Sure enough, Presidential election turnout numbers show little change from 2016, years before the changes were made, and 2020, when they were implemented: a 3% increase. And midterm races actually saw a drop in turnout. Then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 midterm was about 60% and in 2022, at President Joe Biden’s midpoint, it was closer to 50%.
In all, Virginia has, on average, added 1 million voters every 10 years since 1993, with the years following expansion offering little difference.
Mail-in absentee voting has since become more common. While the Virginia Public Access Project found a Democratic lean to the practice, that lean has since decreased, and in 2023 some GOP-dominated districts saw as many new mail-in applications as Democratic leaning districts.
Stewart says that shows the real ticket to increased turnout is well-contested elections.
“When races get hot, the campaigns move into action, they have more ads, they have more get out the vote," he told Radio IQ. "You get more people to the polls.”
And while voting may have become more convenient, that convenience came at a cost.
“We're staffing satellite locations. So that's personnel, that's training that we have to do. Those are hours that we have to be open," says Norfolk registrar Stephanie Isles. "I have to have staff here, before they open up those locations, because we have to run a new poll book every day, we have to wait here at the end of the night for those ballots to come back every night. So that staff staying in the evening," Isles said of the expanded workload under 45 days of early voting. "So, it's a very, very long election cycle. And it's very expensive to furnish that.”
State funding for elections has increased from about $12 million a year in 2018 to $22 million in 2025. Still, the entire state’s budget increased by about $30 billion during that same time period.
And state funding for elections is mostly geared toward election infrastructure and federal elections, meanwhile Virginia votes every year.
That puts strain on officials and led to a bill from Delegate Phillip Scott in 2022 which would have backed off the early voting period to 14 days.
Scott said his 2021 election saw about 100 votes cast a day during the early voting period, but it jumped to 1000 votes a day toward the end.
“There’s absolutely no need to have that expenditure from the localities by requiring 45 days of early voting and not providing any state funds to help them with this,” the delegate warned.
Scott’s bill was killed in committee and an effort to study the financial impact from early voting was killed earlier this year as well.
Another significant voting change, though one a bit more under the radar, was a bipartisan effort from Delegate Dan Helmer in 2021. It required primary elections to include overseas Virginians -think those studying abroad or serving in the military.
“I think it was crazy we weren’t allowing those who serve in uniform to participate in the selection of their nominees,” Helmer told Radio IQ.
But the requirement made the use of closed primaries -conventions, firehouse primaries- logistically too complicated. It also angered some political candidates.
Virginia’s Fifth District Congressman Bob Good beat out incumbent Denver Riggleman in a closed primary in 2020. But Good, head of the controversial House Freedom Caucus, lost the Republican nomination to State Senator John McGuire this year as part of a district-wide open primary thanks in part to the law change.
Open primaries in Virginia require no party affiliation to vote, meaning rumors of opponents switching sides to tilt a primary against another candidate have existed for decades. And sure enough, Good took to social media to ask, “How did Democrats KNOW how many crossover votes they needed in the Republican primary," after his loss.
Helmer thinks Good is just making excuses: “I have a sense Bob Good’s nonstop attacks on our democracy had a much bigger factor in losing his primary than anything else.”
As for Youngkin, when pressed on his feelings about election law changes made by Democrats, he pointed to actions he authorized through the state’s Department of Elections, like pulling the state out of ERIC, or the Electronic Registration Information Center. He instead replaced it with a new multi-state system to prune those who aren’t allowed to vote. Those changes led to the removal of over 6,300 non-citizens from voting rolls since 2022.
“One of the real process improvements we’ve made is bring that down to a daily data scrub to make sure that non-citizens are removed from the voter rolls,” the Governor told Radio IQ.
And Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares called the number removed "shocking," in recent social media posts.
But about 1,300 non-citizens were removed in 2021 and over 800 in 2020. And an effort by Youngkin to clean up voter rolls last year ended with his agency having to reenroll over 3400 voters after they were removed in error.
Questions about what steps his office took to avoid similar errors this year were not answered.
