| Abigail A. Spanberger Democratic | 199,599 | 49.75% |
| Nick J. Freitas Republican | 200,952 | 50.09% |
| Write In Write-In | 639 | 0.16% |
UPDATE: Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger wins reelection. Read more here.
by Brandon Jarvis
In VA-07, voters went to sleep with Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger losing by 40,000 votes to her Republican challenger, Delegate Nick Freitas. However, the absentee and mail-in voting numbers from Democratic sweet spots, Chesterfield and Henrico, were reported early Wednesday morning bringing Spanberger within 800 votes of Freitas.
It’s not over yet either.
With the race being so close, many questions are still up in the air as far as how many votes are left to be counted. Spotsylvania has 34,000 absentee votes left to be reported and Henrico County is working to clarify discrepancies in totals.
Henrico reported results early Wednesday morning, however, there remains some confusion about how many ballots are left to be tallied. The Virginia Public Access Project reports that roughly 21,000 votes are potentially un-reported. “Henrico reported it had received 79,401 AB ballots in CD7. But CAP results totaled only 58,285 – a difference of 21,116.”
Lizzie Drucker-Basch, the chairwoman for the Henrico County Democratic Party tweeted that everything is being monitored. “The machines will be rerun this afternoon,” said Drucker-Basch in a tweet. “[Henrico County’s] registrar is unaware of ‘missing votes.’ There are still absentee votes to be counted. I warn against holding to a number. Democrats watching the whole thing. It will get sorted out shortly. There’s nothing ‘afoot.’ Give it time.”
| Abigail A. Spanberger Democratic | 42,198 | 72.40% |
| Nick J. Freitas Republican | 16,015 | 27.48% |
| Write In Write-In | 72 | 0.12% |
The Freitas campaign tells Virginia Scope that they are not expecting the Spanberger margins with the potentially-missing Henrico absentee ballots to be as large as it was with the absentee ballots already reported. The Freitas campaign is estimating that the votes that are still potentially being counted would have arrived at the last minute, which they believe is a benefit for Freitas.
If Henrico does in fact still have over 21,000 votes, it is hard to see a path to victory for Freitas without overperforming on the absentee count in Spotsylvania.
According to Ben Paviour from VPM News, Spotsylvania election officials are working to separate ballots between VA-07 and VA-01.
THREAD: Here’s why Spotsylvania results are late: apparently some of the “tapes” (holds up to 5,000 ballot images) consolidated votes from CD-1 and CD-7. They’re now separating them, and thought it wiser to report them all at once. pic.twitter.com/GOr66rNgwb
— Ben Paviour (@BPaves) November 4, 2020
UPDATE: Brand new pictures of the Spotsylvania County Office of Elections counting tens of thousands of early votes likely to decide the 7th District U.S. House race between Republican Nick Freitas & Democrat Abigail Spanberger.
— Tom Roussey (@tomrousseyABC7) November 4, 2020
Freitas is up by 563 votes district-wide. pic.twitter.com/HlsTWCoao1
If trends from the 2018 races hold true, as they mostly have in the rest of the district, Spanberger could receive enough votes in Spotsylvania to catch up and pull ahead of Freitas.
Spotsylvania is expected to release their numbers Wednesday evening and we are still waiting for more updates from Henrico. We will update this post when we know more.
“We look forward to making sure that every single ballot is counted,” said Spanberger in a statement on Wednesday.
We will continue to update this post throughout the day.
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