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From Northern Virginia we have another one of those stories about significant election irregularities that you’ll likely never hear about since they don’t fit into the MAGA storyline that is all most political reporters seem to care about. I didn’t know about it myself until I got a note from longtime TPM Reader LB.
Our story starts in November 2020 in the Northern Virginia county of Prince William. The General Registrar in Prince William was Michele White. She resigned at some point in 2021, possibly because of the feral Trumper harassment that led so many election officials to quit during that period. She was replaced by a new registrar, Eric Olsen. Olsen found irregularities in down-ballot races in the 2020 election — but not ones great enough to affect the outcome of any race. Olsen then reported those irregularities to newly elected Republican state Attorney General Jason Miyares.
Miyares thought he had a live one and perhaps a chance to make a MAGA name for himself finding some actual election wrongdoing in the 2020 election. (His top deputy had already had to resign after it was revealed she’d shared Big Lie election misinformation and praised the January 6th insurrectionists. “News Flash: Patriots have stormed the Capitol,” she wrote in one January 6th, 2021 Facebook post, “No surprise. The deep state has awoken the sleeping giant. Patriots are not taking this lying down. We are awake, ready and will fight for our rights by any means necessary.”) He set about investigating White and eventually charged her with two felonies and one misdemeanor tied to the 2020 election. He also set up a special 20-person Election Integrity Unit out of the Attorney General’s office to find other instances of election wrongdoing and fraud.
The case dragged on through 2023 before falling apart at the end of last year. White turned out to be the only one ever charged with a crime by Miyares’ 20-person team. Along the way the AG’s office never made entirely clear what White’s infractions were or the precise nature of the irregularities. In the words of this AP report, Miyares office “never spelled out publicly or in court papers exactly what it alleged White did wrong. Court records indicated only generally that the allegations had to do with 2020 election results.”
Miyares’ office finally dropped the felony charges last month after a prosecution witness revised their testimony; the misdemeanor charge was dropped in early January.
Prosecutors hinted that there were some hidden shenanigans in the change of testimony but were unable to point to any evidence when the judge in the case pressed them on it. White’s attorneys portrayed the whole ordeal as a political prosecution that was baseless from the start. Most notable though was that the Attorney General kept the public in the dark about just what the election irregularities had even been or who had benefited. That is until this last week when Prince William County finally reported that the 2020 totals had shortchanged Joe Biden by roughly 4,000 votes.
The county failed to report 1,648 votes for Biden and overreported Donald Trump’s total by 2,327. Tallies were off in other races but by lesser amounts. As current registrar Olsen had made clear from the beginning the differential was far too small to affect the outcome of the race in which Biden won Prince William by some 60,000 votes and won statewide by 450,000. Olsen said the errors were “likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.”