Left: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Des Moines Area Community College in Newton, Iowa, Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)/Right: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during his first campaign event of the 2024 election season at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 5, 2024. (Photo by Michael Nigro/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
A week after charges were dropped against a former election chief in Virginia, county officials have now admitted they underreported roughly 4,000 votes in the 2020 election for now-President Joe Biden.
Biden won the state of Virginia against then-President Donald Trump in the 2020 race by nearly a half-million votes, so the errors, the Prince William County Office of Elections said in an official statement, were ultimately inconsequential.
In its statement this month, the county office for elections explained: “The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors. The reporting errors 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.”
Biden took Prince William County handily in 2020, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. garnering more than 60% of the vote.
The admission of the discrepancy arrives a little more than a week after Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, dropped a misdemeanor charge for willful neglect against Michele White, the onetime Prince William County registrar and election chief.
White was indicted and accused of lying in 2022 for felony corruption and making a false statement in addition to the misdemeanor charge. She had resigned roughly a year before her indictment.
Miyares dropped the felony charges against White in December 2023 after prosecutors noted that a key witness opted to change their account. Publicly, details underlying the allegations against White have always been vague, the Washington Post reported on Jan. 3 and on Dec. 2.
White was on track to face trial before the charges were dropped. Her attorney, Zachary Stafford, told NBC that allegations she was responsible for inaccurate counting in Prince William County were disproved by pretrial statements from a government witness. Stafford called White a “scapegoat.”
“The board certified incorrect results and they, and the attorney general’s office, attempted to assign blame to Ms. White for their mistakes,” Stafford said in a written statement to NBC.
As for the Prince William County Office of Elections, officials there said in their final assessment of the 2020 presidential, House and Senate races, they discovered:
- Joe Biden was “shorted” 1,648 votes
- Donald Trump “incorrectly received” an extra 2,327 votes
- Both U.S. Senate candidates for Virginia, Mark Warner, a Democrat, and Daniel Gade, a Republican “received too few votes by 1,589 and 107 respectively” though Warner won the race by more than 500,000 votes
- House of Representatives candidate Rob Wittman, a Republican, was “shorted 293 votes but won by more than 80,000 votes”
NBC also reported that Prince William County registrar Eric Olsen said most errors occurred in “split precincts,” or areas where a precinct is split into two congressional districts.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
