Virginia Beach Delegate Jason Miyares won the Republican nomination for Attorney General Sunday, after three rounds of counting in the party’s first counts of its 2021 convention
The drama during past Republican nomination contests has played out on the convention floor over hours. This year it's being measured in rounds.
The Attorney General’s race was counted in three rounds on Sunday. Virginia’s Republicans deployed 80 counters to go through over 30,000 ballots.
On 152 tables vote tellers laid out ballots and sorted through them before reporting them to a staffer entering the figures onto a spreadsheet.
After they counted all the votes Miyares of Virginia Beach led, but not by enough to win in the first round -- only 37% marked him as their first choice, under a weighted voting system. In last place was Chesterfield county supervisor Leslie Haley. About 4,500 voters marked her as their first choice, so in round two, those voters’ second choices were distributed to the remaining candidates.
This was the first iteration of Republican’s ranked choice voting system that will be used throughout the convention. It lets voters submit their preferences beyond their first choice and influence the vote even if their top candidate doesn’t win.
After a discrepancy in the count led organizers of the convention to believe there was a clerical error, Lee Goodman, the party’s general counsel, reiterated instructions to the vote tellers.
“If the second column is empty, it's invalid. If they vote the second column for Haley, then you look at the third column for Miyares or [Chuck] Smith and redistribute it,” he said to the dozens of tellers and candidates’ observers.
Chuck Smith, a former Navy Judge Advocate General, had done better than observers expected, but in the end Miyares kept his lead and kept winning enough of voters’ backup choices to win the nomination.
He will face either Attorney General Mark Herring or Delegate Jay Jones, who are both hoping to be the Democratic nominee.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
