Henrico registrar rejects Elon Musk repost questioning Henrico voter turnout in 2020 election

Henrico County received some unexpected international attention Sunday night as the result of a post on X by the social media platform’s owner, Elon Musk, who has more than 200 million followers.

Musk reposted a tweet from last November made by user George Behizy that cited claims from “election integrity leaders in Virginia” who alleged that they had discovered that “many local precincts in Henrico County” reported voter turnout of more than 100% in the 2020 presidential election.

“Is this accurate @CommunityNotes?” Musk posted, tagging the social media platform’s open-source initiative that is designed to add “helpful context to posts and keep people better informed.”

The original post, and the information on which it was based, was wrong, Henrico Registrar Mark Coakley told the Citizen Monday.

Coakley rebuffed the notion that any precinct in the county reported more ballots cast than registered voters – a claim initially made by data analyst Seth Keshel, who said he had uncovered questionable voting data in the county.

“The assertion that some Henrico County precincts experienced 100% or greater turnout in the 2020 general election is incorrect,” Coakley said.

Keshel’s original claim suggested that two “data aggregators” (which he identified as Redistricter and Dave’s Redistricting Atlas) had somehow been able to combine the total number of votes cast in person on Election Day by precinct in Henrico with the estimated number of absentee ballots cast by precinct and concluded that several precincts reported more votes than they had eligible voters.

But that would be impossible, Coakley said, since there is no way to determine the home precincts of people who cast absentee ballots in Henrico County or any other locality in Virginia that year.

“The 2020 general election was the first in Virginia that allowed no-excuse, in-person absentee voting (early voting),” Coakley said. “Statewide, these early voters completed a generic absentee ballot. These ballots did not include the voters’ precinct information. . . For the 2020 general election, Henrico County’s absentee ballots were counted as a lump sum, and not by precinct, since it was not possible to identify the precincts on the absentee ballots. The same was true for all jurisdictions in Virginia.”

In Henrico, 72,116 people cast their ballots in person at the precincts on Election Day that year, while 110,479 voted absentee and 1,075 cast provisional ballots, according to Henrico data. That amounted to a voter turnout of 77.5% of the county’s 236,922 registered voters.

After the 2020 general election, legislation was passed in Virginia requiring the inclusion of precinct information on absentee ballots, so that the total number of votes cast by precinct could be determined for subsequent elections.