Understanding VA-7 Turnout : As part of digging into the VA data sources, I've gone back to look at 2016 election results to understand the differences between the two. A key house is Virginia's 7th district where Abigail Spanberger(D) was defending her seat from Nick Freitas(R)

2. Spanberger won the seat in the 2018 election against incumbent David Brat. Result : ~176K (D) to ~169K (R). David Brat is famous for defeating Eric Canton in the Republican primary (first time a sitting House Majority leader had lost a primary).

3. Since turnout is generally higher for Presidential races (2016 / 2020), I figured it best to compare those figures in the analysis, but the 2018 results provide some useful context when looking at turnout differences.

4. The analysis I performed was to compare District 7's counties for both 2016 and 2020 elections to see how turnout for Ds and Rs was different. The key take away is that Spanberger's campaign is somehow able to generate > 40% increase in turnout.

5. Let's look at the details. Chesterfield and Henrico County each has ~25K additional votes for the Dem candidate vs 2016's turnout. They also had decreases in turnout for the Rep candidate. Odd considering rest of the counties showed increased R turnout in 2020.

6. Every political consultant and campaign official should be reviewing and studying the tactics and strategies used by Spanberger, since such massive turnout improvements are stunning. How many seats would be in play if any candidate could boost turnout over 40% for themselves?

7. Improving turnout for yourself >40% while at the same limiting your opponent's turnout increase to ~2% might just be the most incredible play this election season. How could this have been achieved? Good ground game or supportive election officials?

8. One aspect to consider is the Change Log from the VA gov website. When a change is performed within the system, the operator should select a reason from a drop down list. One of the options is "Tabulation error in the precinct" and there is also a free text field for comments.

9. There are 85 entries in the Change Log with the reason as "Tabulation error in the precinct". 5 of these have the operator comments filled in, and each one has the same comment : Correction to hand-counted numbers. Let's put these to the side for now, and focus on the other 80

10. The pic shows the 80 "Tabulation Error" entries. The highlighted rows represent Chesterfield and Henrico counties. They represent 40 entries out of a total of 80. That's 50% of the state's tabulation errors came these two counties in VA-7. Why? What was so problematic there?

11. When looking at the changes in these two counties, there are some significant changes in the vote totals. Thousands of votes are added and removed The most impressive correction is a tabulation error that increases votes for Spanberger from ~42K to ~51K votes in Henrico.

12. What's interesting is that the first entry (11/4 @ 1:45AM) was ~42K votes in the Henrico County absentee ballots. But by 4:20PM the same day, her votes increased ~9K due to a "Tabulation error in the precinct". How could the machines miscount the ballots so much?

13. Given Spanberger's margin in the race is 8,270 votes, it would seem @NickForVA has ample reason to investigate / challenge the absentee ballots in Chesterfield and Henrico counties. These two counties produced ~50K more Dem ballots compared to 2016. If I was him, I would ask!

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