Some GOP Ballots Worth More Than Others

Not all the ballots cast in Saturday's state Republican Party convention will be weighted equally. Like convention rules used by both political parties, each local delegation is assigned a fixed number of delegate votes -- regardless of how many people register and show up on Saturday. For instance, Smyth County has 68 delegate votes, but only 48 county residents registered to participate. If everyone shows up in Smyth, each ballot will be worth 1.4 delegate votes. Conversely, Prince William County has 511 delegate votes and 3,810 certified delegates. If everyone from Prince William shows up, each ballot cast will be weighted a bit more than 1/10th of a delegate vote.

Source: Number of delegate votes per GOP unit from the official call for the Republican Party of Virginia 2021 Convention. Number of delegates registered from each unit from the party's list of 53,834 convention delegates certified as of April 28, 2021.

Methodolgy: For this visual, the weight of each delegate vote is determined by this calculation: Number of certified delegates from each GOP unit/Number of delegate votes assigned to each GOP unit. The actual weight in convention results will depend on the number of ballots cast in each GOP unit/Number of delegate votes assigned to each GOP unit.