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.”
In the presidential race, the county mistakenly shorted Biden by 1,648 votes, and overreported Trump’s count by 2,327 votes. The 3,975-vote error in the margin of victory was immaterial in a contest that Biden won by 450,000 votes in Virginia and by more than 60,000 votes in Prince William County.