What you can expect from this year's voter guide • Charlottesville Tomorrow

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Tuesday, July 18, 2023

The main event for today’s newsletter is this year’s voter guide. But a few quick notes before we get started:

It’s hazy out there! The air quality is poor, so if you have a health condition or are in a sensitive group, limit your time outdoors as best you can. Here’s more about the conditions, and the wildfires in Canada that are bringing smoke our way.
City Council officially made Sam Sanders Charlottesville’s new City Manager at its meeting last night. On Thursday evening, he’ll be taking questions from the public for the first time. The hitch? He’ll only answer questions sent by email ahead of time, according to the clerk of Council. Here’s how you can participate in the City Manager’s town hall.
Last but not least, the legal battle over the Robert E. Lee statue formerly displayed in Charlottesville’s Market Street Park is thinning out. The judge has thrown out most of the civil lawsuit that seeks to stop the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center from melting down the statue and turning it into new art. The one claim that will move forward is the allegation that the City of Charlottesville violated Virginia’s open records laws in how it conducted its vote to give the statue to the community organization. The statue of the Confederate general was removed in 2021. Here’s more from VPM about the last claim in the trial for the statue.

Welcome to Charlottesville Tomorrow’s 2023 Voter Guide!

Our goal with this guide is to help as many people participate in our democracy as possible. That means getting information about candidates in all the races, big or small, to you. It also means we plan to ask every candidate about their views on the issues that matter most to you.

Charlottesville Tomorrow has created non-partisan voter guides since its founding in 2005, focusing mostly on Charlottesville and Albemarle County. But many people who use this guide every year have asked us to broaden our scope to the region — and help fill some of the information gaps in the area. So this year we are working hard to do just that. You’ll see as much information as we can muster from almost 100 local and state races in Charlottesville and 11 central Virginian counties. (We don’t include the Richmond area in this guide because there are more media outlets there that provide information.)

But for us to get started, we need to know what you need to know. Here’s a simple survey to help us gather questions for the candidates for local offices — from boards of supervisors to clerks of court. This survey will close on July 24, and we’ll start sending questions to candidates.

Click here to take the survey.

As you get ready to vote, here are some key dates and links from the Virginia Department of Elections:

Sept. 22: First day of in-person early voting at your local registrar’s office.
Oct. 16: Deadline to register to vote, or update an existing registration. You can also register after this date, and on election day, but you will vote with a provisional ballot, could take longer for officials to count because they will verify your eligibility.
Oct. 27: Deadline to apply for a ballot to be mailed to you. Your request must be received by your local registrar by 5:00 p.m.
Oct. 28: Voter registration offices open for early voting.
Nov. 4: The last day of in-person early voting at your registrar.
Nov. 7: Election Day

Need to know if you’re eligible to vote? Here are resources from the Virginia Department of Elections.

Now that the official candidates list have been published, we’ll start adding even more resources here in the guide.

We’re a small team taking on a big project. Jessie Higgins is the editor, Eileen Goode is the lead reporter, and Aliyah Cotton, Erin O’Hare and Tamica Jean-Charles and I are working on research and outreach. The design is by Ashley Harper. And if you want to support this work to provide high quality, non partisan information to voters in our area, get in touch or consider a sponsorship.

I hope it helps you make your best decisions come Election Day!

Angilee Shah, CEO and Editor-in-Chief