Page County bucks Nothern Virginia with highest percentage of ‘No’ votes in northern Shenandoah Valley
By Randy Arrington
LURAY, April 22 — Yesterday’s statewide ballot question showed heavily Democratic counties in Northern Virginia supporting the mid-term redistricting measure by as much as 80 percent. However, Page County voters overwhelmingly opposed the measure, with 80.2 percent of the 9,322 ballots cast here reading “No.”
While counties all across the region also heavily favored the “No” position, Page County was the only county to surpass 80 percent in the northern Shenandoah Valley.
Ultimately, the “Yes” votes won by a narrow margin statewide — 1,531,313 for “Yes” (51.3 percent) and 1,451,250 for “No” (48.7 percent), a difference of 80,063 votes (or 2.7 percent) among more than 3 million ballots cast in Virginia.
The question before Virginia voters in the April 21 special election reads as follows:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
Democrats claimed they drove the referendum to the ballot box because of what has occurred in states like Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, in which the current Administration has ordered state legislators to redraw congressional districts to favor the GOP for the upcoming mid-term elections in order to maintain control of Congress. Republicans claim there’s nothing “fair” about redrawing the lines in Virginia between census counts that will flip the political balance from 6-5, in favor of Democrats — a fair and accurate balance of the political divide in the commonwealth — to 10-1, in favor of Demoracts.
In Page County, voters cast 7,474 ballots against the redistricting measure (80.2 percent), compared to only 1,848 in support (19.8 percent).
While trends and margins were similar across the county’s five districts, District 1 – West Luray (518 votes or 28 percent) and District 2 – East Luray (503 votes) produced the most “Yes” ballots, while District 5 produced the least (239) — only 12.7 percent of the votes cast in Shenandoah.
The most “No” votes came from District 3 – Marksville (1,764 votes or 85 percent), while the least were in District 1 – West Luray (1,334 – still 72 percent).
Voter turnout in Page County was 52 percent, with 9,322 ballots cast in the special election among 18,086 registered voters. Among those, 5,417 cast their ballots in person on Election Day (April 21), while 3,426 voted early in person, and 479 voted by mail.
Statewide, voter turnout came in around 50 percent, with just over 3 million ballots being cast among the commonwealth’s nearly 6 million voters. Across Virginia, 1.6 million voted in person on Tuesday, just over 1 million voted in person early, and 291,248 voted by mail.
Virginia’s total population stands at around 8.5 million.
For a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of Page County’s vote, CLICK HERE.
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