Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, PUBLIC EMPLOYEES—4th Cir.: Jury verdict upheld for Republican election board members who replaced Democratic registrar, (Feb 12, 2026)

By Nicholas Kaster, J.D.

Prospective jurors have “legitimate privacy interests,” and there is a risk that “pointed questions” about sensitive topics might “exacerbate whatever prejudice might exist without substantially aiding in exposing it.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has upheld a jury verdict finding for individual Republican members of a local election board in Lynchburg, Virginia in a dispute over the replacement of a Democratic election registrar. The former registrar alleged that the district court abused its discretion in the management of jury selection and evidentiary challenges, but the Fourth Circuit found no abuse of discretion. The appeals court noted that the process of selecting an impartial jury is delicate and involves complex tradeoffs between competing interests. The district court struck this difficult balance by asking (and allowing the registrar to ask) questions that probed the prospective jurors’ degree of political engagement and ability to render an impartial verdict, while also limiting what questions she could ask. The Fourth Circuit also found the district court’s handling of evidentiary challenges to be “nuanced” and saw no abuse of discretion (Gibbons v. Gibbs, No. 24-1891 (4th Cir. Feb. 11, 2026)).

Registrar. The case involved the appointment of a general registrar of elections in Lynchburg, Virginia. Under Virginia law, elections are overseen locally by three-member boards. Each local board includes two members from the sitting governor’s party and one from the party that got the second-most votes in the last gubernatorial election. Each board, in turn, appoints a general registrar. Boards may remove registrars for failing to maintain certification or discharge the duties of their office. Registrars may not, however, be removed because of their political affiliation, nor may a board fail to reappoint an incumbent registrar on that basis.

Unanimously appointed. The plaintiff in this case was unanimously appointed registrar in 2018 by a board that included two Democrats and one Republican. When the registrar’s most recent term expired in 2023, the latest gubernatorial election had produced a board with two Republicans and one Democrat. Before the registrar’s term expired, she was told the board would be accepting applications for her position and that she would have to reapply if she wanted to be considered. She reapplied and was among the four candidates interviewed.

Reapplied and not selected. The board ultimately appointed a different candidate, who was a registered Republican. The registrar sued the board and its two Republican members, alleging the decision to replace her “was not based on any deficiencies in her performance, but was motivated by partisan political animus toward her non-partisanship.”

Decision below. The board and the two individual Republican members moved to dismiss based on sovereign immunity. A federal district court in Virginia dismissed the registrar’s claim against the board but allowed her claim against the individual members to go forward. The individual members appealed that order, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed (Gibbons v. Gibbs, 99 F.4th 211 (4th Cir. 2024)). The case was tried to a jury, which returned a verdict for the Republican members. This time, the registrar appealed.

Management of jury selection. The registrar argued that the district court failed to properly screen prospective jurors for partisan bias. The Fourth Circuit reviewed the district court’s management of jury selection for abuse of discretion and saw none.

The district court began jury selection with its own questioning of prospective jurors. The court asked all prospective jurors about their knowledge and any opinions about the administration of elections in Lynchburg, and whether their personal political views or party affiliation would influence their ability to “evaluate impartially the evidence introduced at trial and to render a fair verdict.” The court also asked prospective jurors if they had “participated in the administration of local, state, or federal elections,” and posed follow up questions to those who said yes or had otherwise participated in political races. One of the court’s last questions was whether the prospective jurors were capable of basing their decision on the evidence presented and the court’s instructions, independent of their personal or political views. Although it was not required to do so, the district court also allowed the parties to question prospective jurors. For her part, the registrar asked whether any prospective jurors or members of their immediate families had an occupation “that touches on politics or political campaigns.” She also asked how much attention the prospective jurors paid to current events and whether they regularly talked about current events or politics with their family or their friends and co-workers.

On appeal, the registrar challenged the district court’s decision to prevent her from asking more targeted questions designed to “reveal partisan political bias among potential jurors.” Specifically, she protested the court’s refusal to allow questions about political group memberships; prospective jurors’ sources of news; their sharing of beliefs with groups involved in the Jan. 6th election protests; their beliefs about the 2020 election result; and whether as election officials “they would be disinclined to certify the 2024 presidential election result if it did not favor their preferred candidate.

No abuse of discretion. The Fourth Circuit saw no abuse of discretion. “The process of selecting an impartial jury is delicate and involves complex tradeoffs” between competing interests, the appellate court noted. The Constitution guarantees both criminal and civil litigants a right to an impartial jury and requires district courts to remove prospective jurors who will not be able impartially to follow the court’s instructions and evaluate the evidence. But prospective jurors also have “legitimate privacy interests,” said the appellate court, and there is a risk that “pointed questions” about sensitive topics might “exacerbate whatever prejudice might exist without substantially aiding in exposing it.” The Supreme Court has specifically flagged the dangers of questions about prospective jurors’ “political opinions and associations,” emphasizing that such questions will rarely—if ever—“be appropriate.” The Fourth Circuit found that the district court struck this difficult balance by asking (and allowing the registrar to ask) questions that probed the prospective jurors’ degree of political engagement and ability to render an impartial verdict, while also limiting what questions she could ask.

Evidentiary challenges. The registrar also asserted that the district court improperly prevented her from presenting certain evidence. The Republican members contended that the registrar failed to preserve her evidentiary challenges for the court’s review. The Fourth Circuit largely agreed.

Federal Rule of Evidence 103(a) tells litigants what they must do to preserve an argument that a trial court improperly admitted or excluded evidence. A party who contends that a district court erred in excluding evidence must have informed the court of the evidence’s substance by an offer of proof, unless the substance was apparent from the context. At the same time, once the court rules definitively on the record—either before or at trial—a party need not renew an objection or offer of proof to preserve a claim of error for appeal. The Fourth Circuit noted that the district court repeatedly told the registrar that the pretrial rulings that she challenged on appeal were subject to clarification or reconsideration later.

There were, however, two types of evidence where the district court clearly made a final determination and about which the registrar consistently objected. First, the court stated that evidence about national political events (or the individual members’ views about them) would not be admitted absent some tangible connection to their decision not to reappoint the registrar. The registrar protested this ruling, insisting that the topics could not be separated because “the same animus” motivated both. Second, and relatedly, the court stated that it would not permit evidence about other Virginia localities’ failure to reappoint their registrars without evidence linking those decisions to the individual members’ decision not to reappoint the registrar. The registrar insisted that other local boards removed their registrars around the same time as part of a common scheme, and the fact that one of the individual members was “seen at a meeting” of one such board just days before that board removed its registrar was evidence of that scheme.

The Fourth Circuit saw no abuse of discretion on either topic. To begin, the appellate court did not understand the district court to have made an unconditional ruling that evidence about national political events (or the individual members’ beliefs about them) were simply out of bounds. To the contrary, the court acknowledged the possibility that what happened locally could have been an extension of the overall more national discussion about what happened during the 2020 election, and it repeatedly invited the registrar to attempt to make such a connection. At the same time, however, the court stressed that the central issue in this case was why the registrar was not reappointed in 2023 and that discussion of broader matters threatened to derail the trial. The case was not about what happened in that presidential election, the Fourth Circuit stated. The case was about a decision that was made in June 2023 to replace the registrar. Federal Rule of Evidence 403 grants district courts “broad discretion” in making such calls, and the Fourth Circuit found no abuse of that discretion here.

The district court’s handling of evidence about other jurisdictions was similarly nuanced, the Fourth Circuit stated. The registrar insisted that the district court forbade her from introducing evidence about the individual members’ involvement in partisan efforts to replace incumbent registrars in other localities. But the district court said no such thing—indeed, the court took pains to say it was not restricting “evidence of actions taken by these particular defendants.” Instead, the court concluded that the mere fact that one or both individual members “spoke to” members of other boards and that those boards then “did something similar to what happened here” was itself insufficient to raise an “inference” of a common scheme. At the same time, the court emphasized that the registrar was free to try to establish “the missing link” and invited her to proffer the evidence at trial that she would otherwise want to put on. Those proffers never came, the Fourth Circuit noted, and the registrar neither deposed the individual members before trial nor called them during her own case in chief.

Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was affirmed.

The case is No. 24-1891.

Judge: Heytens, T.

Attorneys: Stephen B. Pershing (Newman & Fitch) for Christine Gibbons. David Patrick Corrigan (Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman) for Betty Ann Gibbs.

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