06/13/13: What Tuesday’s primary showed us

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

ONE OF the more enlightening moments of election night Tuesday was a tweet wondering if there were more people attempting to view election results at the two websites providing them than there were people who actually voted in the primary.

The tweet was prompted by the fact that both websites — the Virginia State Board of Elections and the Virginia Public Access Project — had crashed.

The taxpayer-funded SBE site was a mess most of the evening, prompting many to switch to the nonprofit VPAP site. It didn’t take long for the latter to go down; VPAP tweeted that the site traffic was higher than it had been for the 2012 election.

With so many eyes on Virginia — the tweet came from a person in Florida — it was quite possible that more were watching than had voted.

Perhaps the best thing to come out of the crash: bipartisan agreement on the need to do something about the SBE computers from members of the House of Delegates. Democratic Del. Scott Surovell tweeted that his first 2014 budget amendment would be to “properly fund the SBE election results servers.” Quickly agreeing were Republican Dels. Ben Cline and Michael Webert.

About 141,000 Virginians participated in Tuesday’s statewide primary. In raw numbers, this is higher than 2005, the last time Virginia held a Democratic primary with the lieutenant governor’s nomination at the top of the ticket. Since 2005, the registered voter rolls have swelled by more than 842,000.

But in 2005, there was also a Republican statewide primary, with all three top offices on the ballot. More than 188,000 participated in that primary, far more than the 8,000 or so who chose the party’s nominees this year in a convention. Combined, turnout in 2005 primaries was more than 315,000 voters. While just over a paltry 7 percent, at least more of us were participating in the process.

The field is now set for November. Despite the fact that Virginia’s electorate is 53 percent female, all six statewide candidates are male. In its history, Virginia has elected only one woman statewide — Mary Sue Terry, in 1985 and 1989. It would be nice if more female candidates ran for office.

Although I was watching the statewide results, I had a closer eye on what was going on in Norfolk. The city’s Board of Elections did a wonderful job of updating the results as they came in. Turnout in Norfolk was more than triple that of statewide turnout. All politics is local, and driving the turnout was the commissioner of the revenue contest.

Norfolk’s commissioner is the sole woman currently holding citywide office. She was defeated, a result that was not unexpected. But her defeat had nothing to do with her gender. She was done in by her past behavior.

Politicians count on voters having short memories — and they are usually rewarded for it. That didn’t happen Tuesday.

Although the voter turnout was lower than I would have liked, at least those who showed up did what we often say should be done — hold our elected officials accountable. We should all be proud that Norfolk did just that Tuesday.