A Virginia election official who was criminally charged later fallen, over a botched vote count in the 2020 presidential election, the attorney general filed a lawsuit for malicious prosecution on Thursday.
Michele White says in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Richmond, that her prosecution by Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares was “celebrated” by supporters of former President Donald Trump, who alleged fraud in the counting of the votes, and “by those involved in the Stop the Steal movement in confirmation of their message.” The court case seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Miyares’ office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Thursday.
White served as the 2020 clerk in Prince William County, Virginia’s second-most populous county. Miyares sued White in 2022 on charges of corrupt conduct, making a false statement and willful neglect of duty over errors in the 2020 vote counting.
At the time, there was little explanation in lawsuits or from government officials about what exactly went wrong with the vote counting. The criminal case against White fell apart, and in January prosecutors dropped all charges against White.
It was then that Prince William County election officials finally revealed what had gone wrong in the count. In the presidential race, the county wrongly missed Joe Biden by 1,648 votes and overreported Trump’s count by 2,327. 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.
In a U.S. Senate and congressional race, the numbers lagged by smaller margins.
White’s successor as county registrar, Eric Olsen, said most of the errors occurred in “split districts,” in which one district is home to two congressional districts. The county’s voting system did not divide presidential elections by congressional district. The state system required them to be split in that way. The errors occurred when trying to reconcile county data with state requirements, Olsen said.
White’s lawsuit alleges that she was wrongly demonized even though she was not personally responsible for the mistakes, and that her prosecution was used to justify the existence of Miyares’ Election Integrity Unit and appease his Republican base.
“Miyares campaigned on promises to investigate alleged threats to election integrity and combat ‘election fraud’, following more explicit calls from political extremists baselessly questioning the integrity and validity of the 2020 elections,” the lawsuit claims.
Corey Stoughton, one of White’s attorneys, who is working with a group called Protect Democracy in filing the lawsuit, said in a telephone interview that White’s accuser “created the justification for voters to continue to be misled” about the legitimacy of the election of 2020.
The case against White was the only criminal prosecution brought by the Election Integrity Unit, which Miyares founded in 2022.