Former Rep. Scott Taylor said he will run for the U.S. House seat he lost in 2018.
Taylor made the announcement Monday, saying he’ll run against Democratic Congresswoman Elaine Luria this fall for Virginia’s 2nd District.
The 2nd district includes Accomack and Northampton counties, portions of York County, and the cities of Virginia Beach and Williamsburg and parts of the cities of Norfolk and Hampton.
Taylor, a Republican, said one of his reasons for running again is his opposition to Luria’s decision to vote for impeachment of President Donald Trump. He had previously said that he would run for a U.S. Senate seat against incumbent Mark Warner.
Taylor, an ex-Navy SEAL, served one term before being defeated by Luria. His re-election campaign was plagued by an election-fraud scandal.
During Taylor’s 2018 campaign, his staffers were found to have forged signatures on a petition to get Democratic challenger Shaun Brown on the ballot. The move is an old political tactic — an effort to split a candidate’s opponent’s votes.
The third-party candidate was Shaun Brown, a former Democrat who had lost to Taylor during his first run in 2016.
A judge ultimately removed Brown from the ballot after Democrats sued. The judge overseeing the lawsuit said there was evidence of “out-and-out” fraud by Taylor’s staffers.
In May, a special prosecutor presented two indictments of election fraud against someone who worked on Taylor’s failed re-election campaign. Taylor has maintained that he was aware of the effort to get Brown on the ballot by his campaign staffers. But he said he knew nothing of any wrongdoing and fired campaign staff tied to the scandal.
