West Virginia

West Virginia has a plural executive of six statewide elected officials, each chosen independently: the Governor, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the State Auditor, the State Treasurer, and the Commissioner of Agriculture. West Virginia has no lieutenant governor — the President of the State Senate is designated to act as governor if the office becomes vacant and carries the lieutenant-governor title by statute.

Because five of the down-ballot offices are elected on their own, the Governor shares the executive branch with officials who answer to voters and can be from a different party. The Governor appoints the heads of the executive departments that aren’t separately elected.

The West Virginia Legislature is bicameral: a 34-seat State Senate (four-year terms) and a 100-seat House of Delegates (two-year terms), with no term limits. It is a part-time, citizen legislature, with pay of $23,000 a year plus a per diem.

The session is short and fixed: the constitution sets a regular session of 60 calendar days, convening in the winter. The state itself has a singular origin — West Virginia is the only state formed by seceding from another state, breaking away from Virginia during the Civil War in 1863 when the western counties refused to leave the Union — and much of its governmental structure was built fresh at that founding.

A bill is introduced, referred to committee, and — if it advances — voted on the floor of each chamber, with differences reconciled before final passage. The Governor can sign a bill, veto it, or let it become law, and holds a line-item veto over appropriations. West Virginia’s veto is comparatively weak for most legislation: the Legislature can override an ordinary veto with a simple majority of each chamber (budget and supplementary appropriation bills require a higher two-thirds vote), so on most bills a veto is little more than a delay.

West Virginia has no statewide citizen initiative or referendum — voters cannot place statutes on the ballot themselves. Proposed constitutional amendments reach the ballot only when the Legislature refers them by a two-thirds vote.

The Governor appoints the heads of the non-elected agencies, proposes the budget, can call special sessions, holds emergency powers, wields a line-item veto, and holds the clemency power. But the office is checked more easily than in many states: on most bills the veto can be overridden by a simple majority, and a plural executive of independently elected officers runs major pieces of state government.

With no lieutenant governor, the Senate President stands first in the line of succession. The main internal checks on the Governor are the five other elected statewide officials and the (mostly simple-majority) legislative override.

West Virginia’s court system was long one of the simplest in the country: for most of its history it had no intermediate appellate court at all, so every appeal went directly to the Supreme Court of Appeals — and that court had discretion over which cases to hear, meaning some appeals got no full review. The state finally created an Intermediate Court of Appeals that began hearing cases in 2022. Judges are now chosen in nonpartisan elections, a change West Virginia made after a high-profile scandal — later the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling — over heavy campaign spending in a partisan high-court race. The Supreme Court of Appeals sits at the top, above the new Intermediate Court and the trial-level Circuit and Magistrate courts.