- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.org
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.”
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So the election officials in that state are all going to federal prison right?
We’re gonna SLAM them, and they will be officially ON N O T I C E
Lock them up! Lock them up!
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This needs to be thoroughly investigated. If it was a fuckup, fine. If someone did some bullshit, fucking prosecute.
Read the article.
Wait, there’s more than just a headline and a summary? This changes everything
No hunny, it was just a bad dream. But you’re awake and safe now, there’s no such things as “articles”, just headlines.
Unfortunately, it will not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
Did not know SCOTUS ruled on it. Thanks.
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.
That’s interesting to me. Does the requirement for a republic prevent the possibility of a true direct democracy?
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)
So there was election fraud - committed by republicans. Orange man was right, he was just wrong about the party committing the fraud.
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.
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.
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.
No, it was already proven there was election fraud against Trump.
What’s your source?
Years of victim programing
Just because orange Hitler repeats something like a broken record doesn’t make it true.
Weird how fraud isn’t mentioned at all; much less widespread fraud…
Where’s the proof at
‘Citation Needed’
Maybe so, but I only read about cases where a Republican voted twice or used a dead relative to vote for Trump
4000 isn’t an insignificant sum
Turns out there was election fraud after all. Performed by the very ones who claim(ed) the election was rigged.
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“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.
“Turns out”?!
Relax, it’s a figure a speech champ. It’s called being facetious.
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.
I mean, it is given that Biden won this county be more than 60,000 votes already, and Virginia by 450,000.
Ok, but what if it was Georgia where Biden won by 12,000 votes? What if 3 counties in Georgia had the 4,000 vote error margin and flipped the state?
Then that would’ve been revealed in both of the TWO recounts.
Would the outcome have changed?
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.
Stop the steal! /s
