4368 replies to this topic

[Bact PhD]

golden_valley, on 19 March 2021 - 10:57 AM, said:

Games with elections in the Florida Senate



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They flipped a seat from the D incumbent to the R challenger by running a guy with the same last name as the incumbent.



[font=Franklin, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][size=4]ETA: Just realized I put this in the wrong elections thread. Sorry!

I suspect these shenanigans happen with amazing regularity. In the 2018 state Senate race here, a VERY tight race between an incumbent and a local physician, a former city commissioner (one-time Democrat) ran as NPA (read "spoiler") candidate. Interestingly enough, it looked like the GOP was funding this pseudo-candidacy:

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When former City Commissioner Charles Goston, a lifelong Democrat, decided to run for state Senate District 8 as an independent candidate, some wondered if he was in the race simply to split the Democratic vote to help Republicans.

After all, he had just lost a battle to keep his seat on the Gainesville City Commission, had been criticized for missing city meetings, and was on the outs with local Democratic Party leaders.
Records show that those suspicions may not be so far-fetched.

The District 8 seat, held by incumbent Sen. Keith Perry, R-Gainesville, will be one of the key races in the state that could decide which party controls the Senate. First-time Democratic candidate Kayser Enneking is taking on Perry for the district that represents Alachua, Putnam and northern Marion counties.
Currently, Republicans hold the Senate majority 22-16, with two seats vacant.

State filings show that much of Goston’s individual campaign donations have come from Republican lobbyists in Tallahassee and that Goston paid some of that to himself and his publication, Black College Monthly.

What’s more, a newly created political action committee called “Friends of Charles Goston” last week reported that it received $20,000 on Aug. 29 — the day after the primary — from a newly formed Washington, D.C., corporation whose funding sources are cloaked. It is the PAC’s only donation.

You can guess who won...

[LFC]

indy, on 08 January 2021 - 09:22 AM, said:

Sydney Powell sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion voting systems.

https://www.bloomber...on-fraud-claims

Her defense is a doozy. It literally boils down to no person in their right mind would believe what she said.

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Former Donald Trump lawyer Sidney Powell has filed her response to the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems by using more defamation from the conspiracy theories she was spreading in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

According to the court filing documents tweeted by BuzzFeed reporter Zoe Tillman, Powell presented a whole new defense for false allegations that Dominion was part of an election-rigging scheme linked to long-dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. According to Powell, "no reasonable person would conclude" those "were truly statements of fact"

Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Powell and a slew of far-right lawyers spent most of the months following the election spreading lies like the conspiracies about electronic voting equipment from Dominion.

Powell said in her defense that it's impossible to hold her liable for the conspiracy theories she spread because her "opinions and legal theories" were completely unreliable. She even went so far as to compare herself to reporters who are allowed 1A protection by citing sources that can be false.

According to a screen capture from Tillman, Powell went on to say "she disputes that her info was 'false.'"

The filling drew a flood of responses from legal experts and others who tell angry Trump supporters one thing while arguing something different in court.

See their comments below:

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 22 March 2021 - 05:20 PM, said:

Her defense is a doozy. It literally boils down to no person in their right mind would believe what she said.

It's either "I'm so obviously so crazy that no one could credibly claim to believe me" or "I'm a lawyer and I get to lie if I decide it's in my client's interest"?

[Probabilistic]

LFC, on 22 March 2021 - 05:20 PM, said:

Her defense is a doozy. It literally boils down to no person in their right mind would believe what she said.

Her claim reasonable people would have had reasonable doubts makes sense to me. That's a subtle way of saying MAGA exponents are not reasonable people. They are gullible as evidenced by the tens of millions of dollars they donated to the litigation fund inspite of the ridiculousness of claims. She may have duped millions of Trumpers but doesn't lay the basis of Dominion's claims.

[LFC]

LFC, on 19 March 2021 - 09:30 AM, said:

This is a rather interesting challenge by a Democrat who lost their House race by 6 votes. They claim that the race was certified before they had time to prepare for a court challenge and is asking the House to constitutionally reject the Republican and seat her. I had no idea that was a thing. Of course the political optics are awful but I'm more fascinated by this actual ability than the outcome.

TPM explains how common this kind of challenge has been in the past. It also explains the Republican lies that it's just like Trump as they point out that she wants all votes counted while Trump wanted piles of votes thrown out.

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National Republicans have seized on a contested congressional election in Iowa’s second district to accuse Democrats of doing exactly what they railed against former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies for doing after the 2020 race: trying to steal an election.

The Iowa election, which was decided by just six votes, is now before the House Administration Committee after Democrat Rita Hart filed a claim under the Federal Contested Elections Act.

The House is playing a role it has often played before: It has reviewed more than 100 elections since 1933. And, so far, things are proceeding normally, experts told TPM.

That hasn’t stopped Republicans — led last week by Karl Rove in the pages of the Wall Street Journal — from trying to cast Democrats as hell-bent on stealing a seat they didn’t win. Republican congressional leaders have opined that Democrats are guilty of hypocrisy after they opposed Trump’s months-long gambit to toss out millions of votes in key swing states and overturn a presidential election he decisively lost.

The Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who is representing Hart, engaged with that argument directly, making the case in a new brief that Hart’s claim against the certified election in Iowa’s second district is wholly different from Trump’s attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.

Trump “sought to throw out lawful ballots based on unfounded accusations of massive conspiracies and widespread fraud,” Elias wrote. Hart, he contrasted, is trying to “count all lawful ballots” by including 22 rejected ballots in the vote totals.

Hart and Elias contend that including those ballots, which they say were wrongfully rejected due to election worker error, would make Hart the winner of the November election Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by just six votes.

Hart is requesting a hand recount that includes the 22 ballots. The recount already conducted in the district, she contends, did not suffice because it only included ballots that were counted originally, and was not carried out uniformly by the different country boards.

Lawyers for Miller-Meeks filed their brief Monday too, as requested by committee chair Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). Pelosi provisionally sat Miller-Meeks at the beginning of the term.

Miller-Meeks’ lawyers echo one of the primary Republican talking points on the case, that it shouldn’t be before the committee at all because Hart didn’t contest the election in state court first.

“If she is not required to exhaust her state remedies—if the majority of this Committee is going to open the flood gates and start overriding state election law—then the Committee should come right out and say it,” Miller-Meeks’ lawyers wrote. “Let’s not beat around the bush.”

Contrary to the Republican position, there isn’t any requirement that Hart go through the court system before filing her claim under the FCEA, experts told TPM. Hart maintains that there wasn’t time to do so, since the contest court would have had to be filled out with appointed judges and conduct an investigation and possible recount all in the space of just over a week to meet state deadlines.

Miller-Meeks’ lawyers largely declined to address the merits of Hart’s ballot claims, taking umbrage at Lofgren’s asking them to do so before the discovery period of the process.

[LFC]

Georgia prosecutors may be going after Giuliani for making false statements. The last sentence I quoted (bold mine) sum things up nicely.

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Local prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are actively researching whether they can apply “false statement” charges against Rudy Giuliani and other members of Donald Trump’s team for their mendacity-packed attempts to meddle with the state’s 2020 election results, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a former New York City mayor, twice presented Georgia state legislators withfake evidence and wild allegations of a conspiracy theory to commit widespread election fraud. Separately, on two recorded phone calls to state election officials, then-President Trump made specific false claims that votes for him were discarded and suitcases full of votes for Joe Biden were trucked in.

In a Feb. 10 letter to state officials that was first made public by The New York Times, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did note that her investigation includes—among other crimes—potential violations of Georgia laws prohibiting “the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies.”

But, until now, there has been no focus on the legal team’s efforts to explore that specific criminal charge. Instead, news stories have touched on the district attorney’s potential use of election fraud or racketeering charges against Trump’s inner circle. The latter would require that prosecutors prove a pattern of corruption—similar to the way law enforcement finds that mafia bosses direct underlings. The idea here would be to prove that Trump and his lieutenants conspired in a “criminal enterprise” to undermine a legitimate election.

Several former Georgia district attorneys told The Daily Beast that investigators are likely relying on a state law that makes it a felony to “knowingly and willfully” make a false statement on “any matter within the jurisdiction” of the state government. The criminal charge carries a punishment of one to five years in prison.

Applying this state law to the former president's attorney would be a beyond-rare strategy, former prosecutors say. But then again, so was Team Trump’s conduct after the election.

[LFC]

LFC, on 19 March 2021 - 09:30 AM, said:

This is a rather interesting challenge by a Democrat who lost their House race by 6 votes. They claim that the race was certified before they had time to prepare for a court challenge and is asking the House to constitutionally reject the Republican and seat her. I had no idea that was a thing. Of course the political optics are awful but I'm more fascinated by this actual ability than the outcome.

Democrat Rita Hart is fighting back. Her attorney put out a statement tying the Republican squawking in this case to their well documented voter suppression. They are trying to suppress votes to ensure their candidate wins, just as they tried to suppress votes around the nation from the individual to the district and all the way up to the entire state level. He notes that this is just part of their pattern of hostility towards democracy. Good on them! Go on the offensive!

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Democrats are trying to reshape the narrative around the contested election in Iowa’s second district after weeks of Republicans’ using the dispute as a cudgel.

The most high-profile Republicans, including those from the Senate with seemingly little stake in the case, have latched on to the election and repeatedly boosted the same talking point: Democrats are trying to steal this election and are hypocrites for denouncing former President Donald Trump’s attempts to do the same in 2020.

That is not, in fact, the case. Democrat Rita Hart is challenging the November election she lost to Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks by six votes, alleging that a couple dozen ballots were wrongly rejected. She filed her claim under the Federal Contested Elections Act, which kicked the case to the House Administration Committee. Hers is not the only FCEA case before the committee from the 2020 election cycle, but it is the only one Republicans care about. Both sides filed initial briefs last Monday, and responses to each other’s briefs this week.

Up until now, Democrats were on the defensive, protesting the meritless, false equivalency that Republicans had seized on and insisting that this process in the House is business as usual.

A new brief from Hart’s lawyer, Marc Elias, took a different tone.

“Her obstruction is consistent with her party’s outright hostility to fundamental democratic norms,” Elias wrote of Miller-Meeks.

He then detailed those GOP attacks on democracy, “from the baseless attempts of its standard-bearer and his allies to throw out hundreds of thousands of lawful votes and overturn the will of the people last November, to its refusal to uniformly condemn the assault on democracy that unfolded on January 6, to its unanimous opposition to the For The People Act and other legislative efforts to safeguard the vote, to its open hostility to this attempt to prevent the disenfranchisement of 22 Iowans.”

“The position of Contestee Miller-Meeks and the Republican party is now clear,” he added, “the right to vote is worthy of neither respect nor protection.”

Elias and Hart have pivoted to the offensive, tying the somewhat-below-the-radar dispute to broader Democratic alarm about a post-Trump push by the GOP to limit access to the ballot box. Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have introduced hundreds of voter suppression bills, backlash to the high-turnout 2020 election in which Democrats won the White House, kept the House and clinched an effective majority in the Senate. Congressional Democrats have rallied behind HR1, the voting rights package, and are pounding the alarm about the disenfranchisement that will be unleashed absent its protections.

Against that backdrop, Elias, a prominent voting rights attorney, and Hart are arguing that not only is Miller-Meeks dismissing and disrespecting the procedure — she’s trying to suppress Iowa votes. The Democrats’ case centers on 22 ballots they say were wrongly rejected by election workers. If they were added to the vote totals, Hart would win. Miller-Meeks was provisionally seated at the beginning of the term after the election was certified by the state.

Miller-Meeks’ response brief urges the committee again to dismiss Hart’s claim, accusing Hart of challenging the election in the House instead of court to seek out a friendlier adjudicator, and objecting to her proposed discovery process. Miller-Meeks’ team also insisted that she be allowed to depose and cross-examine the voters who cast the disputed ballots themselves.

In the meantime, expect Republicans to stay laser-focused on the case, which they see as both politically helpful and a convenient way to both-sides Trump’s GOP-aided attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 30 March 2021 - 01:34 PM, said:

Democrat Rita Hart is fighting back. Her attorney put out a statement tying the Republican squawking in this case to their well documented voter suppression. They are trying to suppress votes to ensure their candidate wins, just as they tried to suppress votes around the nation from the individual to the district and all the way up to the entire state level. He notes that this is just part of their pattern of hostility towards democracy. Good on them! Go on the offensive!

This is a real election dispute about actual ballots, 22 of them, not fantastical machine counting fraud, mysterious disappearing or appearing ballots and other such nonsense. Never heard of this procedure.

[LFC]

golden_valley, on 30 March 2021 - 01:57 PM, said:

This is a real election dispute about actual ballots, 22 of them, not fantastical machine counting fraud, mysterious disappearing or appearing ballots and other such nonsense. Never heard of this procedure.

This from the article. She's not even the only one but you'd never know that from the screeching of shrill Republicans.

Quote

Hers is not the only FCEA case before the committee from the 2020 election cycle, but it is the only one Republicans care about.