The recount for the Attorney General’s election  starts on monday morning at 7 am (for Fairfax County, Alexandria and Chesapeake), and tuesday for everyone else.  Cities and counties need to complete their recounts by Wednesday, and the Circuit Court panel will start resolving disputes over ballots and then declare the winner.  A recent post reviewed the process.  For most jurisdictions using optical scan ballots, the ballots will be run through the tabulator and ballots that are rejected as having undervotes (no vote counted in the AGs race), overvotes (votes for both candidates), or write-ins will be reviewed and counted if valid.  In Alexandria and Chesapeake, the tabulators can’t be programed to reject these ballots, so all ballots must be handcounted.

Last week, the recount court issued the procedural order governing the process.  It includes as an appendix, this fascinating guidance from the State Board of Elections tells you how to determine if overvote, undervote, or write-in ballots contain valid votes.  The Fairfax County electoral board site also has some good general and Fairfax info.  Including this interesting report explaining what was going on during the Fairfax canvass.

Please let me know asap if you want to volunteer to help the Herring campaign in this important process and haven’t signed up yet.