After last month's elections in Virginia, there was a glimmer of hope that Republicans might still end up controlling the state Senate because of allegations that a winning senator lied about her residency.
Democrats won control of the state Senate by a slim 21-19 margin, but three residents challenged Sen. Ghazala Hashmi’s residency. Candidates are required to live in the district they are running to represent. According to her paperwork, Hashmi lived in Senate District 15 but merely rented an apartment in the district while maintaining her primary residence in her original District 10, which had been redistricted earlier this year.
“There’s no question whatsoever that she does not live in that apartment,” her Republican opponent, Hayden Fisher, said last month. “She definitely clearly intentionally lied on that form. And she does not reside in the district, so she should not represent it.”
“She made no genuine effort to actually move into the district; she just rented an apartment. Why don’t you just sell your house and move into the district? She just doesn’t even care. The arrogance is mind-boggling,” he added.
In November, a group of Chesterfield County residents submitted a petition claiming that Hashmi, who was first elected in 2019 and won reelection last month, failed to meet the residency requirement for candidates in the district they aim to represent. However, a judge dismissed the legal challenge to her residence on Friday.
Several Chesterfield County residents filed a petition in November alleging that Hashmi, who was first elected in 2019 and recently won a second term, was not complying with the requirement that candidates live in the district they are seeking to represent.
In the court proceedings, both sides acknowledged that Hashmi had rented an apartment inside the confines of the Richmond-area 15th District where she was elected in November after the most recent redistricting process resulted in new political maps. But the petitioners argued she had not abandoned the longtime family home where her husband continued to live, which is located near the apartment but in a different district, the one in which Hashmi was first elected.
The petitioners, who lived near the family home, closely monitored the residence and the movements of her family’s vehicles, noting that Hashmi sometimes still spent time there. They argued that Hashmi was falsifying her residency at the apartment and was therefore ineligible to serve in the General Assembly. They asked the court to prevent the Board of Elections from certifying the election, a process that’s scheduled to take place Monday.
[Judge Jan L.] Brodie rejected their arguments, saying that the evidence showed Hashmi had established a domicile at the apartment and that the petitioners had not met their burden of proof.
However, Hashmi claimed that she had moved furniture and personal belongings to the apartment, that she had updated her voter registration and driver's license, and that she routinely worked out of that location. Hashmi admitted that she did spend some nights at her family home to help care for her husband, who was dealing with a medical issue.
Here's the problem with Brodie's ruling: Hashmi didn’t even list her longtime residence on the candidate qualification form, suggesting that she was attempting to conceal her true residency.
“Even if you look only at the document itself, she’s claiming she lives in this apartment, and she didn’t list that she owns a secondary residence when it’s a matter of public record that she owns it,” Fisher noted last month. “Number one, it’s a crime; number two, the board of elections should remove her.”
It was always a long shot for this challenge to get anywhere.
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