2 election officials in a rural Virginia city sue the state over ballot-counting machines

RICHMOND — Two Republican election officials said in a recent lawsuit that they will not certify the results of the Nov. 5 election in a rural Virginia city unless the ballots are hand-counted, perpetuating a false notion that machines tallying the votes can be manipulated.

The suit against the Virginia Department of Elections and Elections Board was filed earlier this month in Waynesboro, Virginia, by the city's election board chair Curtis Lilly and vice chair Scott Mares. In the complaint, Lilly and Mares argued that election officials do not have access to the votes tallied by machines, which they allege prevents them from verifying ''the results of the voting machine's secret canvass.''

The counting system, Lilly and Mares argued, violates a provision of the state Constitution that stipulates such machines must be in public view.

''As Electoral Board members are prohibited from hand-counting ballots, we cannot ensure that the vote tally produced by the voting machines matches the votes memorialized on the case paper ballots,'' Mares said in an affidavit sent to The Associated Press.

The electoral board members filed the lawsuit in Waynesboro District Court. The Office of the Attorney General, which is defending the Department of Elections and State Board of Elections, declined to comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit comes as election conspiracy theorists across the U.S. are moving to support hand-counted ballots, nearly four years after former President Donald Trump falsely claimed the past election was stolen from him. But research shows that hand-counting is more prone to error, costlier and likely to delay results.

In Virginia, voters cast paper ballots that are subsequently counted by machine. In August, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin filed an executive order that mandated the machines are tested before every election and never connected to the internet. In that same order, Youngkin required officials to make daily updates to voter lists to remove ineligible voters, a move that the U.S. Justice Department alleged in a recent suit violated federal law.

''The Virginia model for Election Security works,'' Youngkin said in a statement in August. ''This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue, it's an American and Virginian issue.''

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Olivia Diaz is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.