Dem
51
GOP
49
Everyone knows, at this point, that Donald Trump claimed that 10,000+ votes for him had disappeared in Georgia, and that he wanted Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to "find" them. Of course, Trump had no evidence for his claims, and was really just saying, in code: "Brad, I want you to cook the books."
Despite the obvious chicanery/grasping at straws, Republican officials across the country nonetheless picked up the torch, and performed various bits of political theater aimed at "demonstrating" that Trump was on the mark. Among those folks was Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R), who announced the creation of the Election Integrity Unit (EIU) back in September of 2022. The project was wrapped in high-sounding and non-specific language, but it was well-understood that the purpose was to find "missing" Trump ballots (despite the fact that the former president lost the state by nearly half a million votes).
This week, it was announced that the EIU struck gold, in a manner of speaking. It instigated an audit of the ballots in (light-blue) Prince William County, and found that sizable counting errors took place, to the tune of 4,000 improperly counted votes.
You might imagine that Trump would jump right on social media to trumpet this news, but that did not happen. And the reason it did not happen is that the person who was shorted 4,000 votes was... Joe Biden. More specifically, Trump received 2,327 extra votes he was not entitled to, while Biden was deprived of 1,648 votes. So, the President's margin in Virginia was actually a little bigger than previously thought.
According to the folks who run elections in that part of Virginia: "The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors." Unless you are familiar with the specific equipment being used, this might as well be in Sanskrit, for all the light it sheds on the problem. It sure would be nice if Congress could adopt national standards for what voting equipment is acceptable, and what voting equipment is not.
In any event, irony is not dead. (Z)