Election official accuses Virginia AG of politically motivated prosecution

RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — A former election official sued Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares Thursday claiming the Republican prosecuted her in order to appease election deniers.

Michele White says her reputation as a dedicated election official was tarnished in 2022 when Miyares prosecuted the former Prince William County general registrar for election fraud relating to the 2020 election. The commonwealth dropped the charges in 2023.

“As an election official, I worked every day for nearly twenty years to ensure that Virginia elections ran smoothly and according to law,” White said in a press release. “None of that mattered to the defendants, who showed no interest in the truth. Instead, they treated my career and well-being as collateral damage in their effort to promote false claims of widespread election fraud.”

White says Miyares used her prosecution to legitimize the launch of the state’s election integrity unit, a group of 20 lawyers, many of whom lack election backgrounds, to investigate election fraud. Since its founding, two days after White’s 2022 indictment, White is only official to have been charged.

“It was just a house of cards, and they built it in order to lend credibility to their election integrity unit, which itself was created to lend credibility to the false narrative of widespread election fraud,” attorney Corey Stoughton of Selendy Gay, who represents White, said in a phone interview.

White lodged the complaint against Miyares, former Assistant Attorney General Joshua Lief and investigators Mark Almeida and Howard Mulholland. White claims Almeida and Mulholland lied to prosecutors to ensure an indictment followed.

The charges stemmed from her handling of absentee ballots and discrepancies between actual voting data and those reported to the Virginia Election and Registration Information System database. The database serves as an intermediary software system where local officials report what they know to the state, which uses it and other redundant data, like voting machine printouts, to cross-check vote counts.

The 2020 election went relatively smoothly in Prince William, with only a handful of quickly corrected errors. Two years later, White became Miyares’ target when her successor, Eric Olsen, initiated an unusual audit.

Olsen’s audit found discrepancies between the data in the state system and precinct-level reporting. However, they did not amount to errors that would have changed the election results or required Virginia to commence a recount: President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump by 451,138 votes.

A handful of the county’s precincts are considered split precincts, where multiple congressional districts are represented at one polling location. White and her staff manually disaggregated the split precinct voting data in the Virginia Election and Registration Information System, and White directed assistant registrar Sean Mulligan to update the voting data manually, which introduced some errors that marginally favored Biden, according to the audit. White said investigators knowingly lied to prosecutors, telling them Mulligan had confirmed that White instructed him to input the erroneous data.

According to White, the state dropped the charges primarily because Mulligan would provide testimony directly contrary to the representations prosecutors made to the grand jury.

The integrity unit also accused White of several errors related to absentee voting, claiming White instructed election workers not to record the date absentee ballots were returned to disguise her failure to process them promptly. According to White, this is untrue because investigators knew that scanning returned absentee ballots into the intermediate database upon receipt created a record of the date on which the ballot had been received in the electronic poll book.

White seeks damages and a declaration that the defendants violated her rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and Virginia state law.

“Unjustly prosecuting a dedicated public servant like Michele White does grievous harm not only to the target but to public confidence in our electoral system,” said Rachel Goodman, an attorney with Protect Democracy who represents White. “Election workers are heroes. As we approach the 2024 elections, those who would treat them as pawns in schemes aimed at eroding public trust are on notice: that behavior will not be tolerated.”

Miyares criticized the claims in a statement Thursday.

“This lawsuit is wrong on the facts and the law. The attorney general’s office looks forward to defeating this case in court,” he wrote.