Perriello claims victory in 5th

By Sarah Arkin, Media General News Service
Published: November 7, 2008

MARTINSVILLE — Democrat Tom Perriello has declared himself the winner in the hotly contested battle for Virginia’s 5th District congressional seat.

Perriello, along with some staff members and his parents, announced his victory Friday afternoon at a coffee shop in Martinsville.

“We have defied the pundits,” Perriello said. “We have defied the odds. Through faith, through hard work and through knowing that at the end of the day this campaign was about bringing jobs back to the people of Southside Virginia.”

Late vote tallies Friday afternoon showed Perriello with a 745-vote lead with 158,703 votes to 157,958 for six-term incumbent Congressman Virgil Goode.

Only two localities out of 22 in the district had yet to report their canvassed numbers, which include absentee ballots, provisional ballots, and in some locations paper ballots.

Jessica Barba, spokeswoman for Perriello’s campaign, said Friday there are less than 10 ballots left to be canvassed.

Perriello attributed his success to a number of factors, not the least of which was the direct voter contact on a grassroots level from his staff and volunteers.

“[People] were looking for leadership, not scare tactics,” he said.

Goode’s predecessor Democrat Lewis F. Payne has agreed to help Perriello with the transition process.

Goode, however, said his opponent is jumping the gun by declaring victory.

“With the vote counting process almost complete, it has become clear that there have been a number of reporting irregularities including the misplacement of paper ballots and tape records from electronic machines and miscalculations in vote tallies,” he said in a written statement. “In fact, almost 20 percent of all the voting precincts in the district had reporting errors.

“While current unofficial tallies have me trailing my opponent, these irregularities have cast doubt on the reported totals,” Goode wrote. “.... We will continue to fight to make sure that every single legitimate vote in the 5th District is accurately counted and reported.”

Registrar offices around the district were having problems with the VAMIS software program the Board of Elections uses to tally votes.

As election officials in Danville were entering numbers just before midnight, they got logged out of the system, Registrar Peggy Petty said. A few minutes later, when the system was back up, the 2,571 absentee votes they had just keyed in were recorded, but vote totals for a couple precincts had changed, she said.

When election officials returned to the office at 7 a.m. Wednesday, they manually re-entered all the votes that had already been double and triple checked, Petty said.

Danville completed its canvass Thursday evening and ultimately allowed 13 of 24 submitted provisional ballots.

When the registrar in Charlottesville entered the canvassed numbers, the system wiped out all the numbers recorded from the night before. So while it looks like Perriello made huge gains in some precincts, it’s just because the Tuesday numbers got wiped out, Deputy Registrar Diane Gilliand told The Daily Progress.

The State Board of Elections must certify results by Nov. 24. After that, if the winning margin is less than one percent of the vote, the presumptive loser can request a recount. In that case, the process wouldn’t be complete until December.

Goode earlier in the week said he was focused on making sure every vote got counted once before considering a recount.

Sarah Arkin is a staff writer for the Danville Register & Bee.