A northern Virginia county is acknowledging that it underreported President Joe Biden’s margin of victory there over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election by about 4,000 votes. It was the first detailed accounting of the errors that initially became public as part of a criminal case. Thursday’s admission from the Prince William County Office of Elections comes a week after prosecutors dropped charges against the county’s former registrar. Counts were also off by lesser margins in a Senate and congressional race. In a statement, the county’s current director of elections emphasized that the mistakes did not come close to affecting the outcome of any race.

A Northern Virginia county acknowledged it underreported President Joe Biden’s margin of victory over Donald Trump there in the 2020 presidential election by about 4,000 votes, the first detailed accounting of errors that came to light in 2022 as part of a criminal case.

The admission Thursday from the Prince William County Office of Elections comes a week after prosecutors from the Virginia Attorney General’s office dropped charges against the county’s former registrar, Michele White.

Counts were also off in races for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, though by lesser margins.

In a statement, the county’s current registrar, Eric Olsen, emphasized that the mistakes did not come close to affecting the outcome of any race and “did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.”

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    203·
    6 months ago

    Hey y’all remember that time Katharine Harris purged 120,000 mostly-black voters from the records just prior to the FL 2000 pesidential election that Al Gore won but got denied by Katharine Harris and a conservative SCOTUS? Member that?

    Aw man and then we had 9/11 and Iraq II, the Sanctity of Marriage Act and the financial system collapse?

    And she bought the voter list from Texas! Which. Huh.

  • eran_morad@lemmy.world
    8010·
    6 months ago

    This needs to be thoroughly investigated. If it was a fuckup, fine. If someone did some bullshit, fucking prosecute.

      • aew360@lemm.ee
        583·
        6 months ago

        Wait, there’s more than just a headline and a summary? This changes everything

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        6 months ago

        I still don’t buy it. Virginia has a very robust system with scanned physical ballots which routinely audit to zero percent error. The machine turns green if the ballot is read correctly and red if it is rejected. There’s not really much room for error. The idea that they fucked up a presidential count because the polling station had split congressional districts makes no sense. This reeks of vulnerability testing for a bigger score later on.

        • admiralteal@kbin.social
          2·
          6 months ago

          Hanlon’s razor.

          Is it really so hard to believe a few poll workers (who are, in my experience, mostly seniors) read the report from their local count machines (which are not internet connected) and copied those numbers into the wrong fields on the higher-level election website?

          Is it really easier to believe there is a grand shadowy conspiracy publicly revealing itself with “penetrations” into the system?

          Seems to me you’re mere moments from coiffing an election denial hat, if you feel this way, when we still have no evidence of fraud (including in this story), I see little point in engaging with you.

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
    561·
    6 months ago

    Can someone tell me please why we allow each State to set up its own set of rules/procedures for how federally elected positions are voted on and counted?

    Edit: thank you all for the education. I had actually meant my comment more rhetorically than literally (I’m aware of how the Constitution works, etc.), to spur discussion about changing it, but glad that there was some good educational information in the the replies.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      461·
      6 months ago

      Getting the Constitution passed was a monumental challenge. The US under the Articles of Confederation wasn’t really a country as we’d see it today. It was more like the European Union than a unified nation.

      Adopting the Constitution required 13 independent nations to give up their sovereignty to a federal government. Part of the negotiations was letting states keep certain powers - among them how they would select the President. That’s the biggest there’s an electoral college - each state is given votes according to their population, but the states themselves select the voters.

      The Constitution doesn’t even require that there be a popular election for the President. All 50 states currently choose their electors through a popular vote, but that’s absolutely not a federal requirement.

      One of the scariest things the GOP is trying to do is getting the state legislatures in GOP-controlled states to pass emergency laws if Trump loses in their state to change how their electors are assigned after the election - and in Bush v Gore the Court hinted that that might be perfectly legal.

    • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
      321·
      6 months ago

      Because the founding fathers had to make a lot of concessions to the already existing states that were not thrilled to give up their power and rights?

      States literally don’t even have to have elections. If they pass a law that the their electoral votes will be given to a winner of a raffle or a quiz show, they can do that according to the US constitution.

      • APassenger@lemmy.world
        17·
        6 months ago

        Article 2, Section 1: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows

        Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."

        Now, it could be easy to read that one way, but the Independent State Legislature theory was rejected by the SCOTUS as recently as 2023.

      • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Article IV, section 4 : “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” [~https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIV-S4-1/ALDE_00013635]

        The ‘guarantee clause’ was both a promise that the federal government would help suppress state-level insurrections and protect member states from foreign attack, and a requirement that in order to be a member state, you had to have a government in the form of a republic (i.e., no monarchy-states, no dictatorships). This can be read to mean that democracy of some sort is required, as republics implicitly derive their public authority from the people living in them.

        • TWeaK@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          That’s interesting to me. Does the requirement for a republic prevent the possibility of a true direct democracy?

          • BeautifulMind ♾️@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            6 months ago

            It could, depending on how the court is feeling about it that day, and on whether or not congress writes legislation to provide specifics to just what Article IV, sec4 means. (This seems to have been one of those clauses the framers left as a to-do for future legislators to fill out)

  • LEDZeppelin@lemmy.world
    5813·
    6 months ago

    So there was election fraud - committed by republicans. Orange man was right, he was just wrong about the party committing the fraud.

    • betheydocrime@lemmy.world
      514·
      6 months ago

      Did you read the article?

      In a statement, the county’s current registrar, Eric Olsen, emphasized that the mistakes did not come close to affecting the outcome of any race and “did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.”

      In a phone interview, Olsen said the majority of errors occurred in so-called “split precincts,” in which one precinct is home to two different congressional districts. The county’s voting system did not split the presidential vote by congressional district. The state system required them to be split that way. The errors occurred trying to conform the county data with the state requirements, he said.

      Other mistakes highlighted faults in the county’s validation process. For example, Olsen said he first discovered the mistakes when he noticed that Precincts 607 and 608 displayed identical presidential votes. Someone had entered one precinct’s data into the other by mistake.

      “It seemed like an obvious typo,” said Olsen, who replaced White as registrar and eventually reported the irregularities under his predecessor to state officials.

      Fraud requires intent, and it seems like there was no intent here.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        6 months ago

        Yes, this is complete bullshit if you know anything about Virginia’s voting setup, and absolutely reeks of someone probing for procedural vulnerabilities. The fact that the case fell apart because a state witness got turned as soon as a Republican Governor took power speaks volumes.

    • isthereany@discuss.online
      258·
      6 months ago

      No, it was already proven there was election fraud against Trump. That’s why the statement is now “widespread fraud” or similar wording.

      Several people have already been arrested and charged with election fraud or similar acts on both sides.

      Being an absolutist on this is harmful and further promotes black and white, all or nothing type thinking regarding the security of our elections.

    • theprogressivist @lemmy.world
      265·
      6 months ago

      Turns out there was election fraud after all. Performed by the very ones who claim(ed) the election was rigged.

      • sab@kbin.social
        155·
        6 months ago

        “Turns out”?! Trump was literally recorded calling around threatening people not to count votes. The effort to rig the election was made entirely in the open, the Republicans were basically talking about it on Fox News.

          • sab@kbin.social
            3·
            6 months ago

            Yeah, sorry, didn’t mean to come across as aggressive or dismissive of your point. Reading it back I realize “?!” comes across as a bit much.

            I’m just a bit tired that every time we learn in some new way that the Republican party consists of a bunch of authoritarians we’re supposed to act as if we just learned something new.

    • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
      81·
      6 months ago

      I mean, it is given that Biden won this county be more than 60,000 votes already, and Virginia by 450,000.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    25·
    6 months ago

    Tr*mp (probably): “Total vindication! They did the election fraud in Virgina and now everyone knows it! This was the most corrupt, most frauded election in the history of Americ- what? they were more votes for Biden? Never mind.”

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    20·
    6 months ago

    In the presidential race, the county mistakenly shorted Biden by 1,648 votes, and overreported Trump’s count by 2,327 votes. The 3,975-vote error in the margin of victory was immaterial in a contest that Biden won by 450,000 votes in Virginia and by more than 60,000 votes in Prince William County.

    Y’know I can’t find Michele White’s party affiliation anywhere. Anyone know?

    From: this article (yeah washington times i know, sorry, its one w/o paywall):

    The most serious charges against White had already been dismissed. The Virginia Attorney General’s Office said it was forced to drop felony charges of corrupt conduct and making a false statement because a key witness had revised their testimony.

    . . . In White’s case, prosecutors insinuated that the case fell apart because a witness in the county’s elections office “conveniently” changed their testimony to the detriment of the government’s case.

    At Monday’s hearing, Judge Carroll Weimer asked if the government was implying that there were “shenanigans” that caused the government’s case to collapse. Herring maintained that he considered some of the witnesses’ revisions to their testimony “convenient” but said that he had no reason to believe that White was responsible for those revisions.

    Uh huh.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
    19·
    6 months ago

    Virginia has scanned physical ballots. There is no possible way the count was 4000 votes off without foul play. Audits in the state routinely report zero percent error rates between hand counts and machine counts.

    It’s actually quite notable that they dropped these charges. Youngkin is clearly trying to protect someone or something from sunlight here.