Olsen said in a phone interview that “split precincts,” when one precinct has two congressional districts, had the most problems. County voting did not divide presidential votes by congressional district. The state mandated that divide. He claimed the errors were made trying to match county data with state criteria.
Other errors exposed county validation flaws. Olsen detected the errors when Precincts 607 and 608 had identical presidential votes. Someone accidentally input data from one precinct into another.
“It seemed like an obvious typo,” said Olsen, who replaced White as registrar and reported White's inconsistencies to state officials.
Miyares' 2022 Election Integrity Unit has only prosecuted White. Miyares' office stated the unit was founded to fulfill a campaign pledge “because Virginians expressed concerns to him about our elections as he traveled across the Commonwealth.” The unit was criticized by the NAACP for pandering to election skeptics.
Zachary Stafford, White's attorney, said pretrial remarks from a government witness disproved the claims that White was responsible for the inaccurate figures and that prosecutors rightly dismissed the charges. He stated the county's Electoral Board certified the election results and blamed White.
„The board certified inaccurate results and they, and the attorney general's office, sought to blame Ms. White for their mistakes,” Stafford wrote.
Recent Virginia redistricting has greatly decreased the number of divided precincts that plagued Prince William County in 2020. Elections official Olsen says updated processes and technologies avoid mistakes.
“Mistakes are unfortunate but require diligence and innovation to fix. The inquiry found no intent to harm the electoral process, Olsen said in a statement.