Apparently, President Trump refusing to concede defeat to Joe Biden and fighting the results in the courts and in the legislatures is an affront to our system of government. But when a major law firm with extensive ties to the Democrat party and which was a major player in bankrolling Christopher Steele in his production of the infamous and fake Steele Dossier and the dissemination of that fraud to a credulous American press corps steps in to try to take a lawfully won Congressional seat from a Republican candidate, well, that’s just fine.
At issue are two very close House races. In Iowa’s Second District, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks has been certified the winner by six votes out of over 390,000 cast over Molochian Rita Hart. In New York’s 22d District, all the competence we’ve come to expect from elections officials is on full display as Republican Claudia Tenney clings to a 12 vote edge over neo-socialist Anthony Brindisi:
Over the past three weeks, there have been a series of turns in the counting of 60,000 absentee ballots in some of the eight counties in the 22nd District.
During that time, Brindisi erased Tenney’s election night lead of 28,422 votes. As votes were counted and mistakes corrected, the two candidates took turns leading the unofficial vote tally.
Lawyers for both campaigns muddied the process by challenging the validity of at least 809 ballots, a total that continued to grow ahead of the court hearing.
In Oneida County, election officials lost sticky notes attached to a stack of ballots disputed by campaign lawyers. Election officials admitted in court that without the notes they had no way to explain the reasons why the ballots were challenged or if they had been counted.
Madison County election officials didn’t make any markings on about 130 disputed absentee ballots, and instead gave the judge a spreadsheet that he couldn’t figure out.
Neither county followed a state law that requires election officials to note the reasons for the objection in ink on the back of the ballots.
Even after the judge asked the eight counties to submit final vote totals this week, Herkimer County election officials said they had to correct an error. Brindisi picked up 10 votes and Tenney 35 votes.
Then Chenango County reported that it found 55 uncounted affidavit ballots that had been “mislaid” at the Board of Elections office.
All of the confusion prompted a frustrated state Supreme Court Justice Scott J. DelConte to declare in court that he didn’t know how it would be possible to come up with an accurate vote count when some counties couldn’t provide accurate information.
When reading that, keep in mind that Tenney had a 28,000 vote lead on election night and consider the odds of this percentage of the “corrections” going in the same direction.
But no one really needs to worry about actual votes when you have total control of the process.
Normally this exhaustive process would end matters. Not this year. Ms. Hart’s campaign said it will bypass an Iowa court appeal and ask the Committee on House Administration to intervene. The House has final say on its Members’ elections and the Supreme Court has held that courts can’t intervene in those decisions under the Constitution’s Article I.
That means the count in Iowa’s 2nd District will become a political fight rather than a legal one. House Democrats in 1985 took advantage of the same process to reverse Indiana’s state certification of a Republican winner in a Congressional race. They refused to seat either candidate in January, and in May declared the Democrat the winner after their recount excluded 32 absentee votes.
That was a polarizing moment in House history and it hasn’t been done since. But this is a year of breaking precedents, and the Democrats are well-equipped for the fight. Marc Elias, the Democratic election lawyer, helped use the courts to engineer changes to voting rules ahead of the 2020 election that benefited Democrats. Politico reports that his firm, Perkins Coie, is representing Ms. Hart. Given the sympathetic audience they are likely to enjoy in the House, Ms. Hart’s lawyers want to throw enough doubt on the outcome to give Democrats political cover to overturn the result.
Perkins Coie is also in New York’s 22nd district upstate, where Democrat Anthony Brindisi is down by 12 votes in the preliminary final count to Republican Claudia Tenney. They want a judge to review county election board decisions on disputed ballots. Ms. Tenney’s lawyers warn in a court filing of “the perils of trying to recreate a Board’s findings in the absence of appropriate Board notations,” and ask the judge to put the race to an end.
To flip this election, the Democrats are going to their legal stormtroopers, Perkins Coie, to do the dirty work. What Perkins Coie is doing is laying the groundwork to use the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969 (2 U.S.C. §§ 381) to let the Democrat House decide the outcome.
In the case of Miller-Meeks, where the election has undergone all legitimate challenges, this will be simply a raw exercise of power. Much like how the presidential election seems to have been blatantly ripped off (This Isn’t Just the Theft of an Election, This Is a Message to All of Us), this is intended to build a sense of hopelessness among conservatives. It is intended to tell us that Stalin was right, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
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