Delegate Walker vowed to “Fix” Lynchburg City Council & handed it to the Democrats
Republicans for Liberty
On May 30, 2026, 1,633 Lynchburg Republicans stood in line at the Brookville Ruritan Club and picked their nominees for City Council. They picked Veronica Bratton, Councilman Martin Misjuns, and Mayor Larry Taylor. Two weeks later a room full of party insiders in Stafford County threw their votes in the trash.
On November 3, Lynchburg elected three Democrats to every at-large seat on the ballot: Nat Marshall, Christina Delzingaro and Dave Henderson. Lynchburg Republicans cast more votes than the Democrats did. Republicans still lost all three seats.
Those two events are connected. This is the after-action report: how the primary was thrown out, who did the throwing, who was standing behind them, and what it cost the city.
This report shows its work. Every number here comes from a public filing, a news report, the certified canvass results, or an analysis of the official Republican Party of Virginia firehouse voter file prepared for this report, and each is labeled as such.
Before the primary
In March, two months before the vote, Stephanie Reed went on The Andre Whitehead Political Show and said this about Councilman Misjuns:
"I haven't heard one person tell me that they want Marty to run again. I have not heard that from a single Republican I've spoken to."
Hold onto that. Republicans were about to answer her.
On April 22, Misjuns, Bratton and Trae Watkins announced their slate. (WSET) The next day, April 23, Reed's campaign paid $7,500 to Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig, reported as "consulting." (VPAP; State Board of Elections filing) The Republican Party of Virginia's general counsel, Chris Marston, is an attorney at that firm. (Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig) On April 24, Marston received a letter from Cortland Putbrese, an attorney at his own firm, headed "Legal Defects in Lynchburg Republican City Committee's Canvass" and written for an unnamed "client with a vested interest" in the primary. That afternoon Marston forwarded it to LRCC leaders, describing its author only as "an attorney representing" that client, and added: "I think he has a point." As general counsel, Marston is a member of the State Central Committee, and the Party Plan says its members "shall promptly disclose in writing any known potential or actual conflicts of interest." (RPV Party Plan, Art. III, Sec. A; Art. VII, Sec. J) The party's conflict-disclosure page lists none. (RPV) According to the Party Plan, he was also required to recuse himself after disclosure.
May 30: Republicans vote
On a single Saturday, 1,633 Lynchburg Republicans voted at the Brookville Ruritan Club. They nominated Veronica Bratton (732 votes), Misjuns (727) and Mayor Larry Taylor (683). Chris Boswell finished fifth. Reed finished sixth.
Boswell later went on the No Holds Barred podcast with Rich Roth and claimed the firehouse wasn't legitimate because too few people voted:
"There were thirty-one thousand people who voted in the election. Sixteen hundred people is not a fair representation of what people think." (1:05:15)
That's how out of touch he is. He compared a primary to a general election. Compare it to another Republican primary instead. On August 4, the state itself ran a Republican primary in Lynchburg for U.S. Senate and Congress. Every precinct was open, and voters had 45 days of early voting. It drew 2,965 ballots. (Official results)
The firehouse drew more than half that many in one day, at one location.
June 1–3: The petitions
Under the Republican Party of Virginia's rules, the losing side in a party canvass can appeal the result to the State Central Committee, the party's statewide governing body. An appeal needs a petition signed by 25 people who voted in that canvass. That is what Reed and Boswell's side set out to do.
Reed and Boswell lost. Within 72 hours, they were trying to throw out the result.
Ward IV Councilman Chris Faraldi assembled and circulated all three petitions that were filed. He created all three in an e-signature program, and the LRCC lawyer summed it up: "Three challenges. One organizer. One pool of thirty-three signatories. Four filings in three days."
The appeals asked State Central to throw out the primary. Their main complaint was an Election Day handout from an LRCC review committee. It said Reed, Boswell and Taylor "chose not to participate in the vetting process" and so could not be "officially approve[d]," which the appellants called an improper endorsement. They alleged other rule violations too. What they didn't allege was any problem with the count. As LRCC counsel Susan Oliver wrote, none of the appeals alleged "that the vote tally was inaccurate, that any counted ballot was invalid... or that any identifiable voter would have cast a ballot differently."
Look at who signed. Reed and three members of her family. Boswell and his wife. Mercedes Braun, listed as Assistant to the City Manager. And Jack Collins, a consultant paid by the Reed, Boswell and Taylor campaigns. (TransparencyUSA)
Republicans for Liberty checked all 33 signers against the RPV's own records of the May 30 primary:
28 cast ballots that were counted.
4 had their own provisional ballots rejected.
1 doesn't appear in the voting records at all.
The four rejected signers were Beth White, Dexter Gaines, Hunsdon Cary and Consuella Jordan. According to the LRCC's brief, all four had publicly backed candidates against Republican nominees. Without them, not one petition reaches the 25 valid signatures required.
Jordan was Larry Taylor's authorized representative at the firehouse. On primary night she posted: "Democrats can you work to get cross over vote for the General Election."
Those rejected ballots weren't an accident. Among the other rejected provisional voters who matched a voter record, most had voted in a Democratic primary, according to an analysis of the firehouse voter file prepared for this report. The credentials process did its job.
The appeals went to the RPV's State Central Committee, which met on June 13 in Stafford County to decide them.
June 13: State Central throws it out
On June 13, State Central took up the appeals. RPV Chairman Jeff Ryer said the decision turned largely on that Election Day handout. He called it "a clear violation of the party plan," because a local committee "cannot endorse, or effectively un-endorse" candidates seeking the nomination. (WSET) According to the LRCC's affidavits, fewer than 20 copies went out before they were locked away. And Taylor, one of the three named on it, won his nomination anyway.
The State Central Committee voted 55-17 to nullify the primary and tell candidates to file as independents. (Cardinal News)
The party's own rules required "clear and convincing evidence" that the outcome would have been different. Nobody offered any. According to LRCC counsel Susan Oliver, national committeemen Morton Blackwell and Patti Lyman asked the room: "Where is the clear and convincing evidence that any of these alleged rule violations impacted one single solitary vote?" No evidence was produced.
Chris Marston, the party's general counsel and the parliamentarian of every State Central meeting, did not respond or weigh in on the lack of evidence, rule violations or prior precedent. He never disclosed that his own firm had taken $7,500 from Ms. Reed, one of the appellants. In our view, that is an absolute failure of the duty he owes the party and the Lynchburg Republicans who voted in their local committee process to choose their Republican Council candidates along with rejecting those who support tax-and-spend policies.
Del. Wendell Walker voted with the 55 to throw out the will of Lynchburg Republicans. Afterward he made the following statement about his vote:
"We're going to fix the city council… They went too far." (WSET)
Wendell Walker pledged to “fix” the city council – don’t forget that.
In other words, conservatives wanted to hold City Hall accountable, and that was "too far." Delegate Walker wanted to protect the same city management that received hefty pay raises with no publicly recorded council vote, contrary to what is required by law. (Restoration News)
After Stephanie Reed's $7,500 payment to Chris Marston's law firm, doesn't Marston's failure to follow basic ethics rules requiring disclosure and recusal delegitimize the action taken by the Republican Party of Virginia? It's crystal clear.
There is one more thing the State Central Committee was never told. Under the Virginia Department of Elections' 2026 reporting schedule, every candidate whose office was on the November 3 ballot had to report campaign activity from April 1 through June 4 by June 8, five days before the State Central meeting. (Virginia Department of Elections) Stephanie Reed's campaign filed no report by that deadline. Her $7,500 payment to Marston's firm first appeared in a report she filed on July 15, more than a month after the vote. (State Board of Elections) Had Reed followed Virginia's campaign finance reporting law, the payment would have been public before the State Central Committee met. The conflict could have been raised, Marston would have been required to recuse himself, and the party's own rules for the appeals might have been enforced.
August 7: Watkins steps aside
Trae Watkins finished fourth in the firehouse. He accepted it. On August 7 he withdrew and urged voters to support Misjuns and Bratton. (WSET) He did the right thing.
Reed and Boswell lost the same primary. They stayed in, running alongside Taylor, and split the Republican vote.
November 3: The voters decide
Wendell Walker’s “fix” was to hand Lynchburg City Council to the Democrats.
Republican candidates outpolled the Democrats, 41,059 to 38,494. The Democrats still won all three seats. (The News & Advance; official results)
Here is what the voters said:
Bratton led all Republicans.
Misjuns led every incumbent.
Bratton and Misjuns were the only Republicans to win a precinct. Misjuns was the only Republican to win a ward.
Reed went from 1st to 6th to 6th: first in 2022, sixth in the firehouse, sixth in November.
Taylor went from 2nd to 3rd to 7th. (2022 results, Cardinal News) Firehouse voters gave him a second chance. He blew it by lining up with Reed and Boswell instead of honoring the voters' will.
Reed and Boswell drew 15,909 votes between them. Democrat Dave Henderson took the third seat with 12,633. Nobody can prove where every one of those votes would have gone. But the Republican votes were there. Cardinal News put it simply: Republicans "just fumbled the opportunity."
And Reed's claim from March, that not a single Republican wanted Misjuns to run? Republicans voted twice. Both times, they put Misjuns ahead of her.
What comes next: firehouse primaries work
Here's the bottom line. 1,633 Republicans picked their nominees. A sixth-place finisher, a fifth-place finisher, a sitting councilman and the consultant they all paid built petitions out of 33 signatures, four of which never should have counted. The Assistant to the City Manager signed. Lynchburg's Republican delegate voted to toss it, and said the trouble with Lynchburg conservatives was that they wanted to "get rid of city management." Then Reed and Boswell split the Republican vote in a city that votes Republican, and three Democrats walked into council with outside money behind them.
The firehouse primary didn't fail. It worked.
It drew 1,633 voters, turnout the LRCC's brief calls "more than 300% greater than the participation in the 2022 meeting that nominated one of the challengers."
It kept the Republican nomination in Republican hands. The provisional ballots that were turned away came overwhelmingly from people with Democratic primary records.
It picked a ticket that would have won. On Cardinal News's own math, the nominees it chose had the votes to beat the Democrats if the party had stood behind them.
What failed was the party insiders' and firehouse primary losers' unwillingness to accept the result.
Virginia Republicans can't afford that anymore.
We've now lost ground in two back-to-back election cycles. In November 2025, Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship by more than 14 points, and Democrats gained 13 seats in the House of Delegates, winning 64 of 100. (Washington Post) In November 2026, Virginia's Republican congressional delegation shrank from five members to three, and Rep. John McGuire's margin in our own 5th District fell from 15 points to 2. (Cardinal News) In Lynchburg, Democrat Tom Perriello won the city in the race for Congress, the first time in more than 30 years that a Democrat has carried Lynchburg for the U.S. House. (The News & Advance; official results) Lynchburg was in the old 6th District when Democrat Jim Olin held it from 1983 to 1993. After Republican Bob Goodlatte won the seat and carried Lynchburg in 1992, no Democratic House candidate carried the city again until this year. (Virginia Elections Database; RightDataUSA)
And here in Lynchburg, the last red city in the commonwealth, we lost City Council.
Republicans don't win by letting consultants and insiders overrule their own voters. We win when our voters are fired up and know their vote counts. Firehouse primaries let committed Republicans choose committed conservatives, and conservatives are the ones who get conservative policy passed. If we want to win in Virginia again, we need more of them, not fewer, and we need a party that honors the result.
Conservatives are the majority of Lynchburg Republicans, and conservatives are going to lead the way in taking City Council back. We'll do it with the voters, not with the insiders who threw out their votes.
— Republicans for Liberty
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