Disputed races for the Virginia House of Delegates — which could determine control of the chamber — highlight the potential for fraud and even innocuous bureaucratic glitches to impact elections.

It has been three weeks since Virginians voted for governor and representatives in the House of Delegates, and the tenuous Republican hold is still not confirmed. Democrats swamped Republicans in the election but — as things currently stand — will hold only 49 seats to the GOP’s 51 when the new members take office.

Several losing Democrats are seeking recounts, however, and a federal judge has left open the possibility of ordering a special election. Close outcomes include:

  • The 28th District in Northern Virginia, where Republican Robert Thomas beat Democrat Joshua Cole by 82 votes in a race to succeed retiring House Speaker William Howell.
  • The 88th District in Fredericksburg, where incumbent Republican Delegate Mark Cole beat Democrat Steve Aycock by a little more than 4,000 votes.
  • The 40th District in Fairfax County, where Republican Delegate Timothy Hugo defeated Democrat Donte Tanner by 106 votes.
  • The 94th District, where Republican incumbent David Yancey of Newport News beat Democratic challenger Shelly Simonds by just 10 votes.

No one has suggested that voter fraud played any role in the outcome of any of those races. But elections experts contend that the close races refute the argument that voter fraud is too rare to make a difference.

Even small numbers of illegal ballots could make a difference in races separated by handfuls of votes, said Hans von Spakovsky, a legal analyst at The Heritage Foundation and a member of Presidential Donald Trump’s election integrity commission.

“That should be a big concern,” he said.

In Virginia, illegal voting is not just a theoretical problem. The Public Interest Legal Foundation has uncovered documentation showing thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls — including some who have actually cast ballots. Since the 1980s, according to a report by the voter integrity group, 7,474 ballots have been illegally cast by noncitizens who never should have been allowed to register.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has uncovered documentation showing thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls — including some who have actually cast ballots.

And those are just the people who voluntarily came forward and asked to be removed from the rolls. Representatives from the advocacy organization have said there is no way to determine how many ineligible voters might be on the rolls.

Von Spakovsky said Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe has shown no interest in preventing illegal voting. He noted that the legislature passed a law requiring jury commissioners to alert election officials any time someone picked for jury duty admits to being a noncitizen. That way, von Spakovsky said, election officials could check to see if those people are on the voter rolls and remove them.

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“And McAuliffe vetoed it,” he said.

Von Spakovsky said the only possible motive is that the governor believes removing noncitizens would hurt Democratic election prospects.

“You can understand why he’s doing that,” he said.

Old Dominion University political professor Jesse Richman, who has studied voter fraud, said he has not examined the individual races in Virginia. He said he does not know if the foreign-born population in the disputed Virginia districts is high enough for noncitizen voting to potentially come into play.

Richman’s research, based on a giant survey of the American electorate known as the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, has drawn widespread attention. Digging into the numbers, Richman discovered that some people surveyed admitted that they were not citizens but had cast ballots in the 2008 or 2010 elections.

The numbers were small — and, perhaps, included people who accidentally marked that they were not citizens when they really were. But the data suggested that ineligible voters could sway an extremely close election, he said.

Democrat Barack Obama got 82 percent of the votes cast by noncitizens who acknowledged voting. Richman said that suggests the Republicans with small leads in the contested Virginia races probably did not win because of noncitizen voting.

“Hopefully, it doesn’t become a factor,” he said. “Currently, I don’t think it is a factor.”

Close elections can turn on irregularities even without fraud. The federal lawsuit filed in Virginia to block Monday’s certification of the election results alleges that 147 people voted in the wrong House district because former Fredericksburg registrar Juanita Pitchford moved hundreds of people from the 28th district to the 88th district.

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It is unclear why Pitchford moved the voters; she died in April.

“We also need to be paying closer attention to the work that registrars are doing,” said Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation. “Just these basic clerical mistakes we need to be vigilant for.”

Churchwell added: “These tiny, little irregularities can have massive importance, particularly in these local races where the margins are razor-thin.”