At first blush, there seem to be holes in this story by the Associated Press about a Virginia county that underreported President Joe Biden's margin of victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election by about 4,000 votes. I kept going through the article, and there were unanswered questions. However, one thing we know is that if it were found that Trump's margin of victory was unreported, even though it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election, Republicans would get their torches and pitchforks ready.
But remember that Virginia has a Republican attorney general who eventually had to drop the charges and a Governor whose son tried to vote twice in the state's election. But anyway...
The Associated Press reports:
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."
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.
Mistakes were made, but again, not enough to change the election outcome.
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.
Ohhhh:
The case against White:
The case against White is the only criminal prosecution brought thus far by a special Election Integrity Unit that Miyares formed in 2022. Miyares' office said the unit was created in part to fulfill a campaign promise "because Virginians expressed concerns to him about our elections as he traveled across the Commonwealth." Critics, including the NAACP, said the unit was formed to pander to election deniers.
The NAACP said in 2022:
"This unit is plainly a paper tiger, a public relations ploy to pander to the election deniers and conspiracy theorists who are the real force undermining public confidence in our elections," Robert Barnette Jr., president of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, said at a news conference.
So, this was brought about to pander to election deniers, then found that Biden actually got more votes, so the case was dropped without much noise. This keeps happening. It's not the first time Biden was found to have more votes than Trump after an audit/recount. The system works, but it's my opinion that it will only remain working until Republicans break it. That is their goal. It's 1166 days since the election, and Biden just won the election again, again.
