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.”
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.
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.
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.