RICHMOND, Va. -- CBS 6 political analyst Dr. Bob Holsworth is concerned over the way the Virginia Board of Elections is reporting results on Election Night.
His concern is over the state's election results website which is indicating a certain percentage of the vote has been counted when, in reality, that number does not take into account votes cast during the early voting period before Election Day.
"Clearly, there should have been a better effort made to inform the citizens that these are the votes that have come in today, these are the votes that are going to come in from absentee, and here is the total expected vote," Holsworth said. "What we don't have, for the most part, are all the absentee ballots that were cast. And what we know in this election from what people have told us already, is that Republicans were more likely to vote today, Democrats were more likely to vote early. So I think it would have been incumbent really on the State Board of Elections when they report the numbers on their website. If they had told us, here is the vote from today, here's the percentage of absentee ballots in each district, and would make more sense to citizens."
Holsworth said he was worried that the incomplete early reporting would make people even more cynical about the political process.
"People must think that things are crazy, that, you know, you're looking at 65 or 70% of the vote in the Senate race, Mark Warner is way behind and the AP called it. What in the world is going on? And what's going on is something that's happening in every state right now, because we have to divide the early vote from the vote for today and at least tell people what vote they're receiving when they're seeing all of these numbers," Holsworth said. "And to report 80% of the precincts have reported when we haven't reported the absentee ballots of 90% of those precincts. That's really problematic. And I'm really sorry that the voters in Virginia, and in this region, have this kind of confusion going on tonight."
