The Virginia Department of Elections spent $1.5 million on an advertising campaign leading up to and following last month’s election seeking to assure voters their ballots were secure and the results could be trusted.

It was the first time the department conducted a campaign to engage voters about election integrity. It created and ran ads in rural and African-American newspapers and on radio stations and TV channels across the state, as well as online through Google, YouTube, streaming TV, Spotify and AudioGo, according to documents obtained by the Daily News-Record through a Freedom of Information Act request.

“We were very concerned about the level of misinformation about the administration of elections,” said Chris Piper, VDOE commissioner.

He said the department decided to run the public education campaign over the late winter and early spring of this year, but declined to directly blame the insistence of former President Donald Trump, his campaign and then his voters to deny the election results that culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“At the end of the day, there was enough people confused about how we administer elections that we felt a need to provide more truthful information and that’s what the campaign was about, and to reassure voters that they can trust the results of the election,” Piper said.

It is understandable the state wanted to do such a campaign this year in the wake of the largest absentee turnout in recent memory, according to J. Miles Coleman with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“I would emphasize this is one of the products of our federal system — every state handles voting differently,” he said.

Before 2020, Virginia’s absentee votes made up a smaller share of the ballots, but expansion of absentee voting routes and the pandemic rocketed the levels, according to Coleman.

This large number of absentee votes can be unfamiliar to Virginians and plays into a negative cultural memory during the era of the Byrd political machine of the 1950s, which stuffed ballot boxes with votes in favor of political allies in areas like Southwest Virginia, according to Coleman.

This makes Virginia fertile ground to support questioning election results, especially around absentee ballots, by politicians like Trump, Coleman said.

“I guarantee if you, if Trump still had his Twitter account, I’m sure he’d still be talking a lot about it,” Coleman said.

Republicans across the country have called for stricter voting rules and requirements, which ironically goes against some of their strongest support for candidates like Trump and Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, Coleman said.

“The types of infrequent voters that Trump and Youngkin were able to do very well with are, by definition, the voters who are less likely to have an ID for instance, or go through some of the hoops of trying to get to the polls,” Coleman said.

He said those least impacted by the Republican-led voting requirement changes — white, college-educated voters — are increasingly members of the Democratic coalition.

Gov. Ralph Northam said he is proud of the work Democrats and his administration were able to accomplish in expanding the ability for state residents to vote.

“Isn’t it interesting that the very people that were saying the previous election was stolen, the election went their way this year in Virginia, and I haven’t heard a peep from ‘em,” Northam said.

Virginia’s elections after presidential years are seen as an important bellwether to national politics, further making it imperative for the VDOE to perform an election process without problems while keeping the public informed about the trustworthiness of its results, according to Piper.

He said the changing nature of elections, where people may not know the results by the evening or even next morning, mean that more needs to be done to help people understand how the change does not make elections less trustworthy.

“It’s necessary for election officials to come out and be louder, be more upfront and be more vocal about all the things we do to ensure the safety and security of a free and fair election,” Piper said.

The messaging was not targeted at certain demographics of Virginians, according to Piper. Instead the resources were used to make sure any Virginian would at least come in contact with the information — rural newspapers to get residents who may not have internet access, for instance, he said.

The ads began in September and ended on Nov. 3, the day after the election, according to VDOE documents. Kelly Vance LLC, a Richmond communications firm, worked with the VDOE on the campaign. The firm declined to comment.

Anecdotally, Piper said, the campaign seemed to have had a positive effect. The department is doing follow-up market research, that is not yet complete, to try and get a better grasp of the successes and failures of the messaging.

“I think the most successful thing though were the op-eds and the radio communications from registrars in their areas,” Piper said. “I think it’s so critical that you remind people that these [election officials] are regular folks, just like them, running elections because they’re passionate and they care about the work. And the more we can do to hit that message home to our voters, the better off we’ll be, I think.”

Rockingham County Registrar Lisa Gooden said the public should be able to be informed of election results to the same degree they are able to get information about who is on the ballot and what they stand for.

She also agreed with Piper that it’s important for residents from all over the commonwealth to be able to have their questions about election integrity answered by local election officers who live and work in the same communities.

“Instead of being accusatory, call and ask questions and if we don’t know the answer, we will work to find that answer as quickly as we can,” Gooden said. “We live in the community that we serve, so we have no reason to try and pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.”

Gooden said she received less complaints this year than last year about election results, and when complaints do come, she is able to point to reviews done on random local votes by the Rockinghmam Clerk of Court Chaz Haywood that prove the safety and effectiveness of local election results.

She said she received concerns about election integrity from voters of both parties, but doesn’t focus on voter identity, but instead on how to put their concerns at ease and encouraged anyone with questions to call the county registrar’s office.

Some rural localities’ election officials who helped record audio for the rural radio programs said they also felt the campaign worked, though also based on anecdotes.

“The only gauge that I really have is after the [2020] presidential election, I did get a few emails — maybe half a dozen — from various folks saying the election was rigged or there was fraud,” said Jake Washburne, Albemarle County registrar, who took part in the campaign.

This year, the county set its own record for number of voters — around 52,000 — for a gubernatorial race, and Washburne said he only got one complaint.

“The one complaint was when they went to vote and they went into the school cafeteria, or whatever was the voting room, and they saw an Ethernet port,” Washburne said.

There was nothing connected, but the existence of the port still concerned the complainant who worried results would be downloaded from the internet instead of tallied properly by the ballot machine in the room, according to Washburne.

“If just the sight of the Ethernet port in a school gymnasium or cafeteria is going to send someone into a tizzy, I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to that will allay that person’s anxiety,” he said.

Washburne said he has been encouraged by fewer people crying foul after this year’s election, but last year was still troubling since he has no memory of a candidate or campaign having the kind of reaction to the results the Trump reelection campaign and its supporters had after the results were tallied.

“In the aftermath of the 2020 election, there was all kinds of noise about fraud, deceit, ‘the whole system was rigged’ — that sort of thing,” Washburne said. “So I think the VDOE thought if people understood [elections] a little bit better, that might give them more faith in the system, and I think that’s a good idea.”

Sharna’ White, Surry County registrar, said she never heard the election informational recordings she was featured on, but saw the effort as a positive initiative to reach people who may not otherwise get information about how elections work.

“It’s definitely a different avenue to reach out to people,” she said. “I think it was a great idea.”

Allison Robbins, Wise County registrar, also helped record election informational ads as part of the rural radio partnership and said the VDOE did a good job of reaching people in her area.

“I currently think they should continue those types of programs in the future,” Robbins said.

Next year, the VDOE will do another informational campaign, according to Piper.

“I don’t think the job is done,” he said.