Virginia

An independent city is not inside a county; it is the county's peer. The register is 133 localities — 95 counties and 38 cities — not 95 counties with municipalities beneath them, and a strict county-then-city hierarchy has nowhere to put Norfolk. The names then collide on purpose: four base names are simultaneously a county and a city — Fairfax, Franklin, Richmond, Roanoke — and two counties carry the word City inside their own names, James City County and Charles City County, so a substring test misfiles them as cities. Richmond County is a rural county on the Northern Neck and is not the capital.

HJ4, HB29 and HB1384 sent a mid-decade congressional redistricting amendment to a statewide referendum on April 21, 2026. The Supreme Court of Virginia held on May 8 that the process violated Article XII, Section 1 and nullified the result. But the same bills had already moved the 2026 primary off the third Tuesday in June to August 4, and moved U.S. House filing to May 26 for primary candidates and August 4 for independents. The amendment failed and the calendar change did not, so a crawler holding § 24.2-515 is seven weeks wrong about a date that statute still states.

Article VI, Section 7 gives the choice of every justice and judge to the General Assembly — twelve-year terms on the Supreme Court, eight years on every other court. Virginia elects no judges at any level, which is the exact opposite of Florida inside the same family. A pipeline expecting a judicial tier finds a researched zero here, and that zero must never be confused with a tier nobody has harvested yet.

With no party registration, primary eligibility is geographic. On August 4 the Republican primary ran in all 133 localities behind a statewide U.S. Senate contest while the Democratic primary ran in 82 with no Senate race at all — 6,436,403 eligible registrations against 3,156,651. Treating the August 4 primary as one election with one electorate produces a turnout denominator wrong by more than three million, and the geography does not track partisanship: Norton City had a Democratic ballot and Richmond City did not.

There is no statewide local cycle. In November 2025 every one of the 133 localities was on the ballot for governor, but only 72 elected school boards, 64 elected a governing body, and 46 elected constitutional officers — and that 46 was all 38 independent cities plus 8 counties. Seventeen localities carried no local office at all. The rest elect in even Novembers. Assuming a locality's council is up because its neighbour's is will be wrong about half the time.

Before the August primaries Virginia had already run ten separate elections in 2026 — January 6, January 13, January 20, February 3, February 10, March 3, March 10, March 17, April 14 and April 21 — nearly all of them writs to fill General Assembly and local vacancies, each with its own registration deadline, its own polling-place roster and its own results feed. A calendar shaped around a primary and a general misses most of Virginia's year, and the specials arrive faster than any fixed schedule can anticipate.

The 2022 Census of Governments counts 522 local governments in Virginia — 95 counties, 228 municipalities, no townships, 198 special districts — and exactly one independent school district. Every other division is a dependent agency of its county or city, so a harvest keyed to school-district governments finds one government in a state where dozens of localities elect a school board. And § 22.1-25 leaves division boundaries to the Board of Education on geographical area and school-age population, so they are not required to follow locality lines at all.

The statutes and the Department of Elections say locality where the rest of the country says county, division for a school district, general registrar for the appointed local elections official, and constitutional officer for the five seats Article VII, Section 4 requires every county and city to fill — treasurer, sheriff, attorney for the Commonwealth, clerk of the circuit court, and commissioner of the revenue. The clerk runs eight years while the other four run four, so the bundle does not even share a cycle. Matching on county clerk or county board of elections returns nothing here.