Mike Ginsberg, Chairman of the 8th District Republican Committee, sent out the following email this morning:

On behalf of the 8th District Republican Committee, I want to thank you for all the support you gave to our candidates and our party in the 2010 election cycle.  Although we were unable to elect Patrick Murray to Congress and Mark Kelly to the Arlington County Board, 8th District Republicans mounted a tremendous effort.

Thanks to your efforts, the Murray campaign made tens of thousands of calls to 8th District voters throughout the 8th District.  The Murray headquarters was a beehive of volunteer activity, sending mail, making calls, and greeting folks who came in looking for a sign or some literature.  The Kelly campaign was able to blanket Arlington County with literature and make calls throughout the county to voters.

Every unit contributed immensely to the effort.  The Arlington County GOP further developed its strong precinct operations, ensuring that identified Republicans received a call about the election and that the polls were staffed on election day.  The Alexandria GOP also developed a strong precinct operations program and continued its effective election day GOTV operations, complete with blackberries, to ensure that known Republicans made it to the polls.  The Falls Church GOP spent all of election day calling its known Republicans, and their list was the fruit of a year’s worth of painstaking door-to-door voter ID efforts.  And in Fairfax County, our GOP volunteers staffed all of the Back to School Nights, spreading the word about our candidates, and made enormous numbers of calls from the Fairfax GOP headquarters.  Thank you to our committee chairs, Chris Berg, Brenda Hankins, Bruce Swenson, and Anthony Bedell for their leadership in the 2010 cycle.

Your generosity also enabled the 8th District Committee to launch the Retire Jim Moran program, with hundreds of “Retire Jim Moran” yardsigns and the RetireJimMoran.com website.  Thank you to everyone who came out to help us post our Retire Jim Moran signs.  A special thank you to Tommy Valentine, the webmaster of RetireJimMoran.com, for his nonstop — and extremely successful — efforts to hold Jim Moran accountable during the campaign.  You also helped us with our “Max Out to Murray” program, helped us purchase bumper stickers and other needed collateral, and campaign literature that was distributed throughout the district.

Although we did not prevail on election day, we have much to be proud of.  As a result of your hard work, Patrick Murray received the highest percentage total of votes by a Republican in over 10 years.  Mark Kelly impressed everyone with his campaign, including his excellent cable television ad in the last week.  Mark and Patrick deserve special thanks — it is a great sacrifice to run for office, and they represented us very well.

Overall, as you know, Tuesday night was a tremendous, historic night for Republicans in Virginia and throughout the country.  It was a great night to be a Republican, and with the new Republican majority in the house, we can begin to point things back in the right direction.

Thank you again for everything you do for our 8th District and the Republican Party.

Best regards,

Mike Ginsberg
8th District Chairman

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We are happy to announce that we continue running our RetireJimMoran.com website into the future. Jim Moran has been given a blank check for the 11th time, but we are going to continue keeping an eye on him, and we won’t stop until we finally retire Jim Moran!

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Also today, Anthony Bedell, Chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Committee, sent out this update about the 11th District race where Republican Keith Fimian trails Democrat incumbent Gerry Connolly by a less than 0.5% margin.

Team Fairfax:

Many of you have asked me for an update of the status of the election for Congress in the 11th. Here is what I know as of 11:00 AM Friday, November 5th:

1. No winner has been declared in the 11th Congressional District Election, which remains one of the closest elections in the country.  Three days after the closing of the polls, the difference in votes for Keith Fimian and Gerald Connolly is less than 1,000 votes out of over 220,000 cast in the election-well within the margin for a recount in Virginia.

2. Right now, each locality in the 11th Congressional District is winding up a post-election canvass, including counting provisional ballots.  The canvass is a legal process in which local officials literally reconstruct the results of the election one voting machine and one precinct at a time, to ensure that all votes validly cast in the election are counted fairly and accurately.  Once the local canvass is finished, including provisional ballots, the local officials will send the election returns to Richmond for further review by state election officials, who will certify the official results of the election later this month.

3. The canvass is a public process, and our observers have been monitoring it since the minute it began.

4. There are several developments in the Fimian – Connolly race that may call into question the accuracy of the current vote totals.

Here are the issues that are being looked at:

– In Fairfax County, the voting machines failed to register votes from over 800 ballots, including 106 in the Sideburn precinct alone.  (Keith Fimian won that precinct 58% – 40%.)  In Prince William County, the machines failed to register votes on more than 200 additional ballots.

– In several precincts, there were actually more votes than voters.  That is, voting machines reported a higher number of votes than the number of voters marked on the pollbooks as having voted in the election.

– As of Election Day, there were over 1,150 absentee ballots that had been mailed out to military and other overseas voters but had yet to be received back in the 11th Congressional District.

– We also understand that officials in Prince William County rejected over 280 absentee ballots, with another 200-300 absentee ballots being rejected in Fairfax County.

So the process is unfolding as set forth in the law and these are some of the questions that are being considered at this time.

Thank you.

Anthony Bedell
anthonybedell@msn.com
(703) 766-4467