Eric Olsen thought his job was going to kill him.
He had been the head of elections in Prince William county, Virginia, for almost a year when he unexpectedly announced during an electoral board meeting in October 2022 that he’d be resigning soon. He was dealing with a serious heart condition and worried about the impact of the “debilitating stress” of his new job.
“I am resigning after this election,” Olsen told the board in the wealthy Washington DC suburb. “Because if this is how the general registrars are treated when they are trying to do the right thing, then by God, what happens when something goes wrong?”
He added: “If I’m dead next year, I won’t be a very good registrar anyway.”
Olsen had been a particular target of the local Republican party and election activists because of an alarming error he discovered shortly after taking the job in November 2021: the county had misreported its election results, which he later learned resulted in a roughly 4,000-vote undercount for Joe Biden in 2020.
The mistake, which Olsen found while responding to a public records request, wasn’t large enough to affect any election outcomes – Trump lost the now solidly blue state by more than 450,000 votes – but it turned into fuel for a fire that was already raging among election deniers who claim the race was stolen from Trump.
Olsen ultimately changed his mind last year and decided to stay on the job. Now, he’s heading into another fraught election cycle in better health and with more experience beating back skeptics.
But apart from delivering accurate election results, the election office has another priority that could prove even harder this year: convincing voters to trust them.
Since 2020, activists fueled by Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud have made the work of election officials across the country extremely difficult, causing the rate of election official turnover to reach a historic high, according to recent surveys. In jurisdictions with more than 100,000 voting-age residents, like Prince William county, the turnover rate of election officials has reached close to 46%, the study found.
When Olsen got the public records request and spotted a concerning detail in the 2020 results tabulations, the stage had already been set for a mistake caused by human error to be cast in the spotlight as a huge problem and evidence of malfeasance or fraud.
Olsen noticed that two precincts, listed one after the other, had reported the same vote totals for both Biden and Trump. One matching vote total, he said, could be a coincidence. But two of the exact same number raised giant red flags.
Olsen reported the error to the state board of elections, who voted to refer it to the attorney general, Jason Miyares, who brought charges against Olsen’s predecessor, Michele White, for corruption, negligence and making false statements.
A trial was scheduled to begin early this year, but in December, the state dropped all felony charges, leaving just a misdemeanor for willful neglect of duty. Then, in early January, they dropped the misdemeanor as well.
White resigned in 2021, and much of the office turned over with her.
Olsen, one of the new hires, oversees a team of 18 full-time staff, many of whom had nothing to do with the mistake. They have implemented new vote-canvassing measures aimed at transparency, accuracy and rebuilding trust in Virginia’s second-largest county, and one of the most diverse counties in the country.
But rebuilding trust hasn’t been easy, with election skeptics intent on challenging his work. He has been sued by local election-integrity activists seeking to decertify the 2022 election results – those suits were dismissed – and by the local GOP, claiming he failed to appoint sufficient Republican elections officers. That suit was successful.
The state hasn’t made it easy, either.
A few days after filing charges against White, Miyares’s office announced the launch of a dedicated election-integrity unit (EIU) – following a pattern set by other GOP states – to investigate allegations of voter fraud. It’s the type of office that voting rights advocates have decried as, at best, a solution in search of a problem, and, at worst, a witch-hunt for voter fraud that ends up scaring eligible voters away from exercising their rights.
Chloe Smith, press secretary for the Virginia attorney general, said that “much of the EIU’s work is confidential in nature” and declined to comment on any investigative work, but as of January, the investigation of White was the only criminal prosecution handled by the unit, according to the Washington Post.
White did not respond to a request for comment, but told the Washington Post that the attorney general’s case against her was politically motivated to justify the new election-integrity unit.
“Every aspect of Ms White’s performance during the 2020 election was scrutinized, and the evidence is clear that Ms White did not commit any crimes during her tenure as registrar in Prince William county, and the attorney general’s office wisely dropped the charges,” her attorney, Zachary Stafford, told the Post.
Miyares’s office dropped the charges against White because an employee in the election office changed his testimony, Smith said.
“A prosecutor’s ethical duty is to pursue justice based upon the facts and evidence available, and the case was heavily dependent upon witness testimony,” she said. “However, during preparation for the trial, inconsistencies in witness statements forced us to reluctantly withdraw the charges.”
Smith did not address the charges against White directly, but added that “the attorney general wants every Virginian to have full confidence in our election system”.
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Olsen did not want to comment on whether the prosecution was political, but noted the “chilling effect” that pressing charges against an election official might have for others in a similar position.
Though the charges were dropped, misinformation continues to fester and has contributed to the harassing and threatening messages that the office and its staff have been subjected to.
“There was no fraud,” said Thalia Simpson, the Prince William county communications specialist. “It’s hard for people to realize we’re still humans.”
In an upper corner of a large whiteboard in his office, Olsen keeps a tally of all the elections he has overseen for the county – currently, seven in two and a half years. Simpson, similarly, keeps an “I Voted” sticker at her desk with the date of each election she has worked.
The constant election churn leaves little time to take a step back and change policies and procedures. But Olsen and his office have made changes anyway to improve transparency and, hopefully, gain back some public trust.
The office put out a statement in January detailing just how many votes were miscounted in 2020. “We didn’t have to put out a press release,” Simpson said. The release attributed the error to “a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error”.
“Since 2020, improvements have been made,” the release said.
Among those improvements is a decision by the office to post all ballot scanner tapes, the primary document used to count votes, on its website, which it has done since last year. “You can take that and compare it to the data on the state website, if you want, to make sure that we’re tabulating stuff correctly,” Olsen said.
The county also now has fewer split precincts – polling places that cross into multiple congressional districts – which contributed to the miscount. The county’s canvass, the process of counting ballots, is also more thorough now. The Virginia department of elections also has an updated reporting system with more standards for validating results.
During the April electoral board meeting, Olsen stressed the importance of back-up systems and safeguards. The office’s website has an election-security section that details those steps.
Nevertheless, the outside scrutiny of the office has at times been high. Simpson said the response to the press release on social media was difficult, with people calling for everyone in the office to be fired. Some in the local Republican party and Maga extremists, intent on their belief that elections are rigged, have continued to target the county because of the mistake.
“I got an email the other day related to the Michele thing from some guy in Oregon,” Olsen said.
“Perfect elections are not something that ever happens,” he said. “You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions, involving thousands of people, many of which are just volunteers for a couple of days a year. And so there’s going to be, you know, minor mistakes made.”
Still, the 2020 error motivates Olsen before two critical elections this year. Despite his dramatic attempt to quit, he said he feels more confident about his job going into Virginia’s June primary and the November presidential election. An electoral board meeting in late April was sparsely attended – a sign, the office of elections hopes, of a quiet election year ahead.
“I’ve said to our staff that not only do we have to work harder to overcome [the error], but I want people to look at us and say: ‘That’s a model election agency,’” he said.
“Their processes are good, their results are transparent. They are doing things beyond just what is required.”