While most of the focus has been on the fraud that happened in the presidential election, it’s also worth nothing that other Republicans are also getting screwed by sketchy, late rushes of Democrat votes counted well after the election had ended. One case has become especially egregious, and it’s taking place in New York.

The race for NY-22 has suddenly flipped to the Democrat by 13 votes and the story behind how that happened will have you punching walls or facepalming, whichever you prefer.

The judge miraculously "found" enough ballots that he felt were okay and the incumbent now "leads" by 13 votes.https://t.co/miAlX6bZpD

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) November 28, 2020

After trailing in the polls by over 28,000 votes on election night, upstate Democratic Rep. Anthony Brindisi claimed victory Wednesday in the 22nd district over his Republican challenger — celebrating a slim 13-vote lead.

A Democrat that was losing by 28,000 votes in a district race (i.e. that’s a huge margin for a non-statewide race) is now claiming victory by 13 votes because a judge stepped in and put his stamp of approval on enough rejected ballots to make it happen. The implications here are just insane. If a single judge can decide he gets to be the arbiter of which ballots are accepted even after they were rightly rejected under the law, that opens nearly every close race up to judicial meddling.

In the grand scheme of things, assuming the Republican ends up losing here, one House seat isn’t a catastrophe. The GOP will still be well positioned to retake the chamber in 2022. But it sends a message that this kind of tampering is acceptable. Hopefully Claudia Tenney has some other legal recourse here, perhaps appealing this in federal court. I wouldn’t begin to assert that I know all her options at this point.

Regardless, this is the danger of mail in ballots and judges being allowed to nullify election law at their whim. We saw the same thing on a larger scale in Pennsylvania, where a court unilaterally decided that the election laws simply no longer applied in that state, allowing thousands of additional ballots to come in after the legal deadline. Mass mail in ballots in general, at least when done in a way where they aren’t required to be in some days before the election, are also awful for the credibility of our system. How can anyone feel good or confident in the integrity of our elections when huge shifts in votes happen weeks after the fact due to late arriving and/or counted ballots?

Republicans control a lot of state levers of power, from governorships to state houses. They need to be wielding that power to fix this stuff. If they don’t, they can expect to be slowly weeded out by the very fraud they’ve ignored.

UPDATE:

Alright, so I got an email from Tenney’s comms director. He disputes some of the information in the article, which I pulled from the sources listed above. I always want to make sure any misinformation is corrected. According to him, the judge has not ‘officially’ ruled on the disputed ballots. Whether that means the judge has went through them or whether he hasn’t looked at them at all, I’m not sure, but it’s probably best to just wait and see at this point. He also said that Tenney is actually up +12 as of this moment. That lead is precarious after 44 supposedly valid ballots were found today, but we have to wait and see what happens there as well. If there’s anything else sent to me to add, I’ll update this post again.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)