Over the past couple of days, I have heard and seen countless complaints about how the Virginia General Elections turned out. A couple of these consist of how northern Virginia should be it’s own separate entity because the rest of Virginia is red. I find those arguments completely insane. As someone from southern Virginia, I believe I speak for thousands of other people in that area when I say not all of southern Virginia is conservative.
In fact, if you look at certain areas, such as Richmond, you can see the surrounding districts are also becoming blue as well. These suburban areas are having people from other states and from cities move in, which is a likely reason for this change in voting.
Moreover, cities even in southern Virginia have a tendency to vote more liberally as well as be more densely populated. In fact, this is true for most cities in the United States. In northern Virginia, there are around three million people. Compare that to somewhere like Pittsylvania County in southern Virginia, which has a little bit more than 60,000 occupants that always vote more conservatively.
While the maps might be showing an overwhelming amount of red, it does not show each individual voter. To compare Virginia to the United States, the state basically relies on the popular vote rather than the electoral vote. Personally, I prefer this way more because it feels my vote and other’s votes actually matter. I say this because, in the presidential election, someone could lose the popular vote and win the electoral college.
I feel like the real issues that should be complained about in this election is voter suppression and gerrymandering. Because everyone has been so offended about northern Virginia being all blue, many have ignored the gross amount of reports of voter suppression.
One precinct in Richmond ran out of ballots at 8 a.m. Two areas in northern Virginia had ballot issues, which could end up penalizing voters and invalidating their votes. Stafford, again, was given the wrong ballots for this election. The number of voters that were given the wrong ballot is unknown as well. Those are just a few of the reported counts of voter suppression in our state, this year. I can only imagine there countless amounts of these incidents that go unreported.
Personally, I just find the complaints about annexing northern Virginia completely selfish and ridiculous. Especially because some of the districts that were shown as red could be blue, but were not due to the copious amount of voter suppression in this year’s election. In fact, those votes also could have made Virginia elect more conservatives. Therefore, I feel like this is a nonpartisan issue that both sides should be concerned about.
While gerrymandering has not seemed to be a huge issue in this year’s election, it has been in the past. In fact, Virginia Republicans drew up a racial gerrymander, which placed a large number of people of color in noncompetitive districts for almost a decade. These severely impacted Democrats in previous elections but did not in this one.
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