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.”
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.