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.”
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.