by Andrea Epps

It’s no secret that I was thrilled to watch Glen Sturtevant’s name replace Amanda Chase’s on the election night ticker. However, this isn’t about my disdain for Chase, nor my approval of Sturtevant; I don’t even know him.

This is about simple math and what I believe to be a last-ditch effort at a con job by a professional.

I’m sure not many people expected Amanda Chase to do the right thing and concede with grace. No, most of us expected some post-primary cry of foul. I did expect, however, that her foul cry would be based on something that made sense, and it doesn’t.

Since Tuesday, Chase has hit the airwaves and social media with the claim that the early voting in Chesterfield County was rigged. This accusation is ridiculous on its face to anyone who knows about elections in Chesterfield. The registrar’s office has been run like a Swiss watch for years, but even that doesn’t matter in this case.

Let’s look at her claim by the numbers. As Lynn Mitchell noted, Chase is claiming that the Chesterfield County early vote contained 346 “illegal” votes. Well, okay. Even if we give Chase the benefit for argument sake, guess what?

SHE STILL LOSES! But how?

If, for argument’s sake we say there was any issue whatsoever in the early vote (there wasn’t), then it would naturally mean the entire early vote, not just 346 votes she doesn’t like. Just so happens that 346 is the number of votes she would need to tie Sturtevant, but I digress…

If you subtract the entire early vote from each candidate, you end up with the following:

Sturtevant: 7791-1080 = 6711
Chase: 7565-871 = 6694
Ramirez: 4892-488 = 4404

Sturtevant still wins.

Now, before anyone starts throwing shade, yes I understand that this is simply Amanda’s way of trying to cast doubt on the entire primary. However, she apparently doesn’t understand the difference between the early vote and the absentee vote, either. She uses the terms interchangeably in her statements. If you’re going to claim a rigged primary, at least base it off of something that adds up.

The primary wasn’t rigged. She just lost. Her claims about the “law” are actually quite sad. Apparently, she thinks she’ll fare better as a write-in candidate. That might explain her latest posts begging for money.

Amanda, you lost. Woman up and let it go.

Andrea Epps is a senior contributor with Bearing Drift. Reprinted with permission.