Virginia AG Charged Election Official With ???, Now In Stage Of 'Finding Out'

No, not finding out what he charged her with, that's still secret.

The likes of Ken Paxton of Texas and Andrew Bailey of Missouri get so much attention for being terrible Attorneys General that the execrable Jason Miyares of our own commonwealth of Virginia often slips by unnoticed, free to continue being an utter MAGA degenerate with all the moral fiber of a drowned rat borne through the sewers and expelled into the nearest ocean as if the sewage system itself had gained a sense of disgust.

Yeah, we don’t like the guy, he’s a bully and he looks vaguely like a bloated and less charming Chris Rufo.

Last week Miyares was sued by the former registrar of Prince William County, a slice of blue territory near Washington DC. The registrar, Michele White, claims that Miyares indicted her on bogus corruption charges in 2022 after a 2020 tabulating error resulted in the county reporting incorrect results.

What horrific crime against democracy is White alleged to have perpetrated? Nobody actually knows, because the AG’s office has never actually said in any court filing. Miyares has also never released the actual indictment, which is definitely the sort of move a prosecutor pulls when he is confident about his case, absolutely.

All anyone knows is that the charges had something to do with purposely not counting votes, and were dropped after the main witness against White changed his testimony. Also well after an audit determined that the tabulation error had resulted in an overcount of about 2,300 votes for Donald Trump, who still lost the state by 10 points.

The complaints against White were a byproduct of the insane claims that Republicans, particularly Trump, have been making about “rigged” elections ever since he got his ass beat in 2020. Miyares and our governor, Smilin’ Glenn Youngkin, have made “election integrity” a high priority, since Virginians keep committing the cardinal sin of occasionally voting for Democrats in sufficient numbers to put them in office.

In fact, White claims Miyares used her case as a justification for establishing his Election Integrity Unit, a group dedicated to ensuring “legality and purity” in the state’s elections. In two and a half years, the unit has managed to force a conservative group to stop sending out some allegedly misleading flyers, and also … that’s about it. Ironic that the unit was founded because of bullshit concerns about election integrity from MAGA weirdos, and their only success has been against a bunch of MAGA weirdos.

All of this is part and parcel of Republican efforts to try and rig the vote in Virginia in their favor. Early in his term, Youngkin stopped automatically restoring the voting rights of convicted felons who have served their prison sentences, reversing a policy by the state’s last Democratic governor. There is also his stupid purge of the voter rolls, for which the Justice Department just sued him to get him to stop.

And out in the tiny city of Waynesboro, election officials have declared they will not certify the vote in November unless they are allowed to hand-count the ballots, because of Freedom:

“Yes, there are some that have blind faith in the machines,” elections board Chairman Curtis G. Lilly II said in an email to The Washington Post on Monday. “And some that say Officers of Election already have enough to do, but this is the price of freedom!”

The red-leaning Waynesboro’s entire population is just shy of 23,000, and Trump won it in 2020. Its congressional district, VA-06, has not had a Democratic representative in 30 years. And yet it is the Republican members of the local elections board who are pushing this worthless stunt that will do nothing but possibly delay the certification of a vote whose outcome hasn’t been in doubt in, like, ever.

In a swing state, some of this crap might be of concern. But Joe Biden won Virginia by 400,000 votes, Kamala Harris is on track to win by eight or nine points, and Sen. Tim Kaine is cruising to re-election by double digits over the hilariously named Hung Cao. (Which is pronounced just like you think, you perv.) Our House delegation will likely split 6-5 to the Democrats.

About all these shenanigans are accomplishing is pissing off Democrats and motivating them to turn out this November and in the state elections in 2025, when voters will pick a new governor and a new and narrowly divided Legislature.

And the hell of it is, Virginia has a pretty robust election system:

Virginia has a robust system for ensuring the accuracy of its elections, according to Jennifer Morrell, chief executive of the Elections Group, a Chicago-based nonpartisan organization that trains and supports elections officials on operations and administration.

The state conducts “accuracy and logic” testing of machines ahead of Election Day … After sample ballots are fed into every machine, observers from both parties compare the tally with the paper ballots to make sure the result is accurate. The machines are then locked and sealed until Election Day.

There are a whole bunch of redundancies and fail-safes built in to the system. The GOP is throwing out solutions for problems that don’t exist, as it is doing for voting systems everywhere.

For her part, Michele White came out of the ordeal without the job she had held since 2015, and with the career in elections work she had pursued for two decades wrecked beyond repair. She is yet more collateral damage in the Republican war on reality, and we will be happy to see our tax dollars go towards compensating her.

[WaPo / WaPo]

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