State Senator John McGuire (R-Goochland) remains the winner of a closely contested Republican primary in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, despite an unexpected additional review of ballots from five of the district’s 24 towns, nearly a month after a full recount that did not significantly change the election outcome.
In cooperation with the registrars of the counties of Amherst, Cumberland, Halifax and Mecklenburg and the city of Danville, the summoned At a hearing Wednesday afternoon in Goochland County District Court, a three-judge panel corrected some minor reporting errors that resulted in incumbent U.S. Rep. Bob Good (R-Farmville) receiving four more votes, shrinking McGuire’s lead to 366 votes.
The court also considered a petition from Good’s attorney, Brad Marss, objecting to some of the costs associated with the recount for the congressman’s campaign. The court granted some objections, resulting in a reduction of the total costs from $104,000 to $88,918 – less than the $96,500 estimated by Goochland’s Chief Judge Claude Worrell, who headed the recount committee, at a preliminary hearing in July.
“We checked and checked and checked everything,” Worrell said at the end of Wednesday’s hearing. “We asked representatives from different areas to come over and show us what we were looking at, but it ended up getting a little more complicated.”
In their review, the justices found that some of the registrars’ reporting methods deviated slightly from the court’s original instructions, causing the numbers to not match the final result. However, the differences were too small to affect the outcome of the recount or the election overall.
Jason Corwin, Mecklenburg County’s registrar general, said in a phone interview earlier this week that his staff discovered several minor math errors during the recount at two of the county’s 22 polling places.
“When we took the original recount certificate, we put in a couple of wrong numbers. One was 36 and should have been 37, and one was for early voting where we put in 283 and 128, and both were off by one vote,” Corwin said in the interview.
Goods Campaign submitted a petition for a district-wide recount eight days after the election was certified from the State Board of Elections in early July. The chairman of the powerful House Freedom Caucus told supporters in an email at the time that he was seeking a “complete recount,” including a manual count and a comparison of ballots with reported machine results.
Bernard Goodwyn, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, then appointed the three-member recount panel, consisting of Worrell, Judge J. Christopher Clemens of Salem and Judge Christopher Papile of Newport News. Worrell originally ordered the recount for July 31, but later postponed it for a day due to scheduling conflicts.
Before the recount, McGuire’s lead over Good was 0.6 percent, putting the incumbent within the 1 percent margin that would allow him to request a recount at his campaign’s expense, but above the 0.5 percent threshold that would require local governments to cover the costs.
Candidate-funded recounts are rare in Virginia because they are expensive and have little impact on the outcome of the election. And after the court reviewed the recount results that election officials from across the county filed with Goochland County Circuit Court on August 1, Good received just four votes, reducing McGuire’s lead to 370 votes and effectively ending Good’s bid for a third term.
The court on Wednesday agreed to consider some, but not all, of Good’s objections to the costs the court assessed in the days following the recount. For example, it granted a motion by Marss to dismiss a $2,800 bill from Lunenburg County for its district attorney because the costs were “undocumented” and “not reasonably necessary to the proceedings.”
However, the court found other expenses billed by the municipalities to be justified, including mileage and other travel expenses for the poll workers and deputies who accompanied the poll workers with the ballots to Goochland on August 1. The court also upheld its order that Good’s campaign team must cover the food and catering costs incurred by the poll workers during the voting process.
Speaking to reporters in the courtroom on Wednesday, Marss, Good’s attorney, said the court’s decision to schedule another hearing weeks after the recount was completed was highly unusual.
“I have never heard of a hearing like this,” Marss said. “I think it’s unfortunate that it happened this way. Without the disagreements between the different localities, this would not have happened in a hearing but in the form of written memos.”
Good said in a text message after the hearing that his campaign team would pay the costs set by the court within 21 days. He also thanked the court for correcting the irregularities in the final accounting.
“I appreciate the judges’ efforts to correct some errors identified after the recount,” Good said.
Sean Brown, a spokesman for McGuire, said the changes the court reviewed Wednesday were “all clerical errors” made either by the registrars or by the court on the day of the recount.
“The court granted Good’s objections to costs for the Lunenburg District Attorney, the Albemarle Clerk and the sheriff’s deputies. The court said that because it viewed the recount as a judicial proceeding, those costs should not be imposed on the parties. The court rejected all of his other objections,” Brown said.
McGuire, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump three weeks before the primaries, had turned his campaign into a referendum on which candidate was more loyal to the likely Republican presidential nominee. Trump’s endorsement likely tipped the scales in his favor – McGuire won the election with just 374 of the 62,792 votes cast.
Days after losing the recount, Good dispelled persistent rumors that he would seek the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia by filing a formal “statement of candidacy” with the Federal Election Commission declaring that he would run again in the 5th District in the 2026 election.
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