Council to hold work session on voting precinct changes
Charlottesville does not elect its five Councilors by wards. Two of the current Councilors even live on the same street.
But the city does have more than 32,000 registered voters split among nine precincts. The Charlottesville Electoral Board is suggesting moving two of them to new locations.
That “reprecincting” proposal is the subject of a Charlottesville City Council work session at 4 p.m. today. (meeting info)
“This will be discussion only,” reads the staff report from Registrar Taylor Yowell. “A public hearing and ordinance will be considered at a later date.”
There is no advance information available on the registrar’s website. I got an email on December 5 from James Nix, one of the three members of the Charlottesville Electoral Board.
“We are proposing to continue with nine polling places adding Jackson Via Elementary School and Charlottesville High School as replacements for Alumni Hall and Tonsler,” Nix wrote in an email to me. “The Tonsler voters will mostly be split between Buford and Jackson Via and the Alumni Hall voters will be split between Venable and Walker.”
Nix said Tonsler is too small with inadequate parking and Alumni Hall is not owned by the city. The Buford precinct has the fewest registered voters in the city with 2,375. The changes would see over a thousand voters moved to the middle school if they vote on Election Day.
“About forty percent of the city voters will be voting at a different location with these changes,” Nix wrote.
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