Was our local electoral board and court system used to target a local activist?
A former federal prosecutor thinks so. There's also evidence that a letter accusing Tanesha Hudson of felony voter registration fraud, which prompted her prosecution, was itself fraudulent.
As previously reported, a rare voter registration fraud case brought against local activist Tanesha Hudson was quickly dismissed on June 30, but not before costing Hudson her government job and raising questions about why a grand jury for Charlottesville Circuit Court sought to investigate her in the first place.
“I have thoughts as to various reasons or actors with motives to bring the indictments and prosecute, but they’re too speculative,” says Hudson’s attorney, Elliot Harding. “That being said, I do think it was someone with an agenda to harm Ms. Hudson due to her outspoken advocacy and nature for speaking boldly against the powers that be.”
Harding suspects at least one member of a seven-member grand jury for the February 2026 term sought to have Hudson investigated for felony voter registration fraud in the March 2024 presidential primary.
Hudson, 44, has been using the address of her family home in Charlottesville to register to vote since she was 18 years old, which she has also used to vote absentee when she was away from home over the years. Several years ago Hudson bought property located in Albemarle County, but she has kept the address of her family home in Charlottesville as her registered voting address and has never had any problems voting. Indeed, before being indicted and charged with a felony, she had never received any notice or warning about irregularities with her voter registration.
Just a week before Hudson was indicted, a profile about her appeared in Vinegar Hill Magazine, which highlighted her years as an outspoken local activist. She also spoke frankly about the “real cost of her activism.”
“You’ll get it from all sides. You’ll be targeted. They’ll target your kids, you’ll get hate mail, you’ll get threats,” she said. “…these are real results of things that will happen to you and you got to just keep going.”
After her case was dismissed, Hudson put everyone involved in prosecuting her on notice.
“Charlottesville, consider this my Intent to Sue Letter because I’m coming. This time we taking it to the Federal Court,” wrote Hudson in a July 2 Facebook post.
An investigation looking for a prosecutor
Hudson’s 2026 prosecution was prompted by a letter from a private organization claiming to be the Voter Integrity Project — known for their voter fraud hunting efforts — that was received by the Charlottesville Voter Registrar’s office and dated September 29, 2022. The letter, written directly to then Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, accused Hudson of voter registration fraud and perjury and called for her investigation. Here’s the letter:
Taylor Yowell, Charlottesville’s General Register of Elections, says in a recorded conversation obtained by the DTM that she called Commonwealth Attorney Joe Platania after receiving the letter to “ask what we should do in this situation,” she said. Soon after, Platania filed a motion for the appointment of a special prosecutor, saying that he received a phone call on October 10, 2022 from a “Charlottesville government official” with information about “potential criminal conduct” by Hudson, and that he sought a special prosecutor because he was “so situated with respect to the subject of the potential criminal investigation that it is rendered improper.” Hudson had successfully sued the city in 2020 and was well-known to those in Platania’s office.
As previously reported, Platania’s office repeatedly declined to comment on Hudson’s case, but in a recorded phone call obtained by the DTM, Platania said he recalled “some kind of complaint coming in” about Hudson in 2022 and believed the Goochland County Commonwealth Attorney was appointed as special prosecutor, but said he could not recall anything happening after that. Indeed, there’s no record of charges ever being filed against Hudson at that time. As for the case against Hudson this year, Platania said he “knew something was going on” but never filed a motion for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Circuit Court Judge Claude Worrell “must have done that on his own,” he said. Indeed, Worrell appointed Greene County Commonwealth Attorney Edwin “Win” Consolvo as special prosecutor, and assistant CA Adam Rhea eventually led the effort.
As Rhea confirmed in emails obtained by the DTM, Hudson’s prosecution was indeed prompted by the old letter. In an email to Yowell on May 13, Rhea said the plea deal he was planning to offer “should satisfy the folks that wrote the letter that started the inquiry into Ms.Hudson.” Yowell was recorded as a witness on a charging document when the special grand jury formally charged Hudson on March 27, and was on Rhea’s witness list for a possible trial, along with two of her colleagues. It’s clear from Rhea’s long emails that he considered Yowell a kind of “client” or “victim” in this case, as he provided her with detailed accounts of his progress and sought her feedback. Oddly enough, Yowell was mostly unresponsive, something Rhea complained about, replying with a simple “Thank you” to one of his long emails.
It’s worth noting that Jon Bright, a member of the regular grand jury that moved to impanel the special grand jury to investigate Hudson, also happened to be the Republican Party Chair of the Charlottesville Electoral Board, along with Democratic Party Vice Chair Suzanne Michels and Democratic Party Secretary Jim Nix, who oversee Yowell’s position.
Along with Bright, a local business owner and former Republican city council candidate, other members of the regular grand jury included business analyst Darryl DeGuzman, former city councilor Heather Hill, former Buford Middle School principal Eric Johnson, retired businessman Boyd Lee Knott, Jr., Erica Uhlmann, a medical case manager for the IRC, and computer consultant James Weissman.
The special grand jury created to investigate Hudson included regular grand jury members DeGuzman, Knott, Jr., Johnson, and Weissman, with the addition of philanthropist and former Miller Center Foundation Board member Jennie Hantzmon, non-profit executive and Charlottesville Tomorrow board member Kristen Suokko, and former city councilor Kathleen Galvin.
As some DTM readers wondered: how is it that two former city councilors and other prominent local citizens ended up on these two juries? As one legal expert explained to me, Virginia has a judge-led process for selecting grand jurors, and while those selected must meet certain standards defined by the Code of Virginia, they tend to be people the judge knows or knows of. As a result, prominent and willing local citizens often appear on grand jury lists, especially in small towns like ours.
As already mentioned, Judge Worrell presided over the regular grand jury and its decision to impanel a special grand jury to investigate Hudson, while retired judge Edward Hogshire presided over the June 30 trial and dismissed the case.
A rare prosecution
As previously reported, Llezelle Dugger, Charlottesville’s Clerk of Court, said that Hudson was the only person in Charlottesville to have been charged with voter registration fraud so far this year, and that only a dozen or so people have been charged with that crime over the last two decades. However, according to Platania, his office recently conducted a search and found no records of anyone in Charlottesville ever being charged with felony voter registration fraud.
“These prosecutions are rare. I couldn’t find any case law interpreting it,” said Charlottesville defense attorney and legal expert David Heilberg.
What’s more, a grand jury member (or members) calling for an investigation, as opposed to someone in law enforcement or a prosecutor presenting a case, is rare as well.
“We haven’t had to do one of these where the GJ [Grand Jury] asked to investigate something before, at least not since my last 10 years,” wrote Kelly Shepard, a judicial assistant in the Charlottesville Circuit Court office, in an email to the Greene County prosecutors handling the case.
“It really seems like a no harm, no foul situation to me, “ Heilberg added, “ particularly because, considering politics, her [Hudson’s] vote would likely be less meaningful than in more purple Albemarle. A simple letter asking to correct her registration would have been a better expenditure of taxpayer funds.”
Indeed, federal prosecutors also didn’t see the merit of pursuing the case.
According to that May 13 email from Rhea, federal prosecutors were asked to take up the case but declined, saying they saw no federal harm with Hudson voting in the 2024 primary because the ballots were the same in the city and the county. That would be true with all federal elections generally, the feds said, because the city and county are in the same congressional district. Still, Rhea pressed on, suggesting an offer that would put Hudson “on probation” for two years if she pleaded guilty, with Yowell acting as her “probation officer” to make sure she was voting using the correct address, which could include, believe it or not, “viewing the inside of her residence” if she chose to move.
Hudson would reject Rhea’s offers, which prompted him to prepare for a possible trial. In a June 2 email, Rhea told Yowell that he would be asking the court to issue witness subpoenas to her and her fellow Election Board officials, Joshua Jenkins and Maurice Walker.
He also made an unusual request.
“You had also said that someone on the election board had a son or daughter who is a next-door neighbor of Ms. Hudson in the county,” Rhea added. “You had said that it was hoped that that person would not be needed as a witness, but I don’t really see how it can be avoided.”
In the end, no witnesses were needed, as Harding argued that the special grand jury never had the authority to charge Hudson in the first place.
DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO QUASH INDICTMENT: Only a special grand jury convened at the request of the Attorney for the Commonwealth may return an indictment directly. By contrast, a special grand jury convened on the court’s own motion or upon recommendation of a regular grand jury is limited to investigating alleged criminal conduct, filing a report of its findings and recommendations, and being discharged. Any resulting indictment must then be prepared by the Attorney for the Commonwealth and presented to a regular grand jury. That mandatory statutory procedure was not followed here. Instead, the special grand jury failed to issue a report and returned a true bill itself. Because the indictment was returned by a body acting beyond the authority conferred by the General Assembly, it must be quashed.
What’s more, Harding pointed out that Hudson had publicly clashed with jurors Johnson and Galvin on various issues, and was well-known to others on the two juries, calling into question the court’s effort to ensure impartiality.
DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO QUASH INDICTMENT: Before a special grand jury may be impaneled, the presiding judge must examine each prospective juror individually and under oath concerning those qualifications, certify in writing—and not under seal—that the jurors are qualified, impartial, and disinterested, and ensure that the examination is recorded by a court reporter, subject to the applicable secrecy requirements. Id. These statutory requirements are mandatory.
Although Rhea did his best to fulfill the assignment he had been given, hoping Hudson would agree to some kind of plea deal, the case quickly collapsed.
“Ultimately, Ms. Hudson was subject to an indictment that the law does not afford and her case was dropped appropriately,” says Harding.
“The genesis of this investigation is discouraging though not surprising,” former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy told Hudson via text before she went to trial. “It proves that you are being targeted for your activism -- which is outrageous.”
About that letter…
Finally, new information raises some questions about the authenticity of the letter from the Voter Integrity Project that originally prompted Hudson’s prosecution. As you can see, there’s no named signature or logo and no return address. Additionally, in response to a FOIA request for information concerning the letter, the current Virginia Attorney General’s office said: “no records could be found or exist responsive to this request.” And Jay Delancy, founder of the North Carolina-based Voter Integrity Project, says he knows nothing about it.
“I have no idea who Ms. Hudson is, and we’ve never conducted such research on out-of-state voters unless they’re somehow tied to North Carolina,” says Delancy.
Delancy was featured in a New York Times story earlier this month about the growing number of election deniers holding office on electoral boards and overseeing state and local elections. In North Carolina, where Delancy is based, a new election law favoring Republicans led to a dramatic change on electoral boards across the state, as “each of the state’s 100 board of elections chairs flipped from Democratic to Republican” last year. And according to the NYT, DeLancy, a long-time election activist and election board member himself, has been “at the center of efforts” to restrict Sunday voting in the state.
Delancy was curious about the origins of the letter about Hudson and reached out to people he works with in Virginia. None of them had any idea who mailed that letter, or remember even doing such a research project, he said.
Delancy says it’s not something his organization normally does unless a contact in Virginia asked them to run a database query.
“Either way, having them send the criminal referral is not the way we’ve ever done it. Had that letter come from our organization, it would have had my name—and signature — on it and none of that passive voice cowardice.”
Delancy said he wonders if the letter might have come from a fraudster named Matt Braynard, a former Trump campaign operative, who he says stole his organization’s corporate identity after the 2020 presidential election and went around telling people he was the founder of the Voter Integrity Project. Del;ancy says Braynard “raised a ton of money through crowdsourcing” before they got him to stop. Journalist David Corn wrote about Braynard for Mother Jones in 2020.
“This is purely speculation,” says Delancy, “ but while using our name, he may have organized some grassroots efforts, and that letter may have come from one of his followers.”
Evidently, no officials in Charlottesville sought to question the authenticity of the letter or even find out where it had been mailed from. When asked, Yowell said the physical letter and envelope it arrived in, which would have presumably had a return address on it, were destroyed sometime in 2024 and replaced with a scanned version of the letter only. Yowell said she could not recall the return address on the envelope.