Tag: Election lawsuits

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Election Day Chaos: The Political Climate Crisis and the Top 10 Constitutional Remedies

By: Jeffrey Winograd

Election Day is on the doorstep and the related political climate crisis is threatening to overwhelm the American social fabric.

The Congressional Research Service (Election Day: Frequently Asked Questions) describes Election Day as “the day legally established for the general election of federal public officials: President, Vice President, and U.S. Congress.”

It is obvious that Election Day in America has been hijacked by the various states. “State and local elections are often, but not always, held on the same day as federal elections,” according to the CRS.

In fact, Election Day, as now practiced, is a misnomer of epic proportions – better to call it Election Weeks. The result is that more than 100 election lawsuits that impact the conduct of federal elections are now on court dockets across the country.

Typical Election Issues Circa 2022  

Looking at the United States from outside its borders, it must be unimaginable to view a laundry list of issues that continue to overwhelm the judiciary in various jurisdictions.

The issues contributing to the chaos run the gamut from requiring photo identification to signature matching to the use of unregulated drop boxes for ballots.

No wonder there are so many Americans who have been labelled “election sceptics.”

The Constitutional Fix

While the Constitution and federal statutes provide a structure for elections and voting in the United States, election administration is primarily a state responsibility, explains the CRS.

A second CRS publication (Campaign and Election Security Policy: Brief Introduction) delves a bit further and, as if by magic, emerges a golden constitutional nugget: “The U.S. Constitution and federal statute regulate the division of governmental responsibility for election security, although no statute is devoted specifically to the topic. Most broadly, the Constitution’s Elections Clause assigns states with setting the ‘Times, Places and Manner’ for House and Senate elections, and also permits Congress to “at any time…make or alter such Regulations” (Art. I, §4). [Emphasis Added]

It would seem that, if projections on the eve of Election Day are accurate, the Republican Party is likely to be the majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives.

Consequently, the GOP can claim “ownership” of the issue and deliver a comprehensive package of federal election reforms for delivery to the White House for signature.

Top 10 Fixes

A series of bicameral legislative hearings could produce a comprehensive package of reforms that would withstand any constitutional challenges and progressive Democratic claims of racism and other bogus issues.

Take a look and even compile your own Top 10:

#1 Establish a 3-day period named Election Days, running from a Sunday through the following Tuesday, with no early voting except via restricted absentee ballots.

#2 Valid photo identification is a must with provisions to give low-income citizens, regardless of race, such identification.

#3 Given the open border in the south, proof of citizenship is essential. Passports and birth certificates (along with a photo ID) are common-sense possibilities with others to be added.

#4 Mail-in ballots and absentee ballots only for cause and with 100% signature matching by humans.

#5 Drop boxes for ballots must be restricted, regulated and placed at secure locations.

#6 Specific standards for voting machines must be established and enforced.

#7 Ballot harvesting must be prohibited.

#8 Ballot counting timeframes and procedures must be established and enforced.

#9 So-called ballot curing must be prohibited unless carefully regulated.

#10 No voter registration on Election Days.

Pennsylvania Calamities

The argument for restricted early voting is best made by the unfortunate case of John Fetterman’s candidacy for the Senate. Most fair-minded persons among those who have already voted for him would now likely want to reclaim their vote.

And then there is a significant ballot counting issue that has been festering in the Keystone state for more than two years. Read about it at the risk of winding up totally confused.

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Featured

Marc Elias Redux: The Prophet of a Potemkin Democracy

By: Jeffrey Winograd

The dark shadow of Marc Elias, the maestro of Democratic party election law manipulation and the epitome of legal ethics as it is now practiced in American party politics, has cast a pall over the integrity of activities related to what has become falsely labeled as Election Day.

Elias’ name became mainstream during the 2020 presidential campaign and subsequent post-election legal battles in a host of states but especially in those states where the victory margins for Joseph Biden could potentially be wiped out if the legal challenges by and in behalf of Donald Trump had seen the light of day as opposed to being “canceled” (aka dismissed) in some 40-plus instances solely on the issue of plaintiffs’ legal standing.  

According to Wikipedia, “Elias supervised the response to dozens of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign seeking to overturn Biden’s win. Out of 65 such court cases, Elias prevailed in 64.”

Master of Ephemeral Ethics

For those uninitiated in the true politics of Elias, deception is the order of the day. To those under his spell, he appears to be a sweet talker.

But then there is a revelation that suggests something fundamentally undemocratic lurks under his 100% pure façade. “If we don’t use the tools we have to save democracy today, then we may have a wonderful museum of unused tools in the future, but we won’t have a democracy to use them in the future,” he recently told Sue Halpern, a writer for The New Yorker.

This from the same guy who played a prominent role in the events that led to the probe of the recently elected 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump.

As described by political reporter Mollie Hemingway in “Rigged,” in 2016, Elias, on behalf of the “Hillary for America” campaign and the Democratic National Committee, hired a firm called Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. Fusion then retained Christopher Steele who produced the salacious and fictional “Steele dossier” which was instrumental in the creation of the Robert Mueller probe of Trump.

The funding for Steele came from part of the $5.6 million in legal fees paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to the firm of Perkins Coie where Elias headed its political law practice. This was a closely guarded secret hidden behind alleged attorney-client privilege. On Oct. 24, 2017, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, a darling of progressive Democrats, posted a tweet: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and sanctimoniously, for a year.”

And here is another insight into the ethical conduct of Elias.

Commenting on Elias’ efforts to boost campaign finance limits on political parties, Prof. Rick Hasen, University of California, Irvine School of Law, a highly respected legal scholar who writes the popular Election Law Blog, stated in a Jan. 30, 2022, post: “One election lawyer wrote to me, ‘And did you notice that Elias was paid $20 million by dark money groups to fund his rogue, scattershot legal work in 2020?’”  

If the claim cited by the anonymous source of Pro. Hasen holds up to scrutiny, coupled with his actions in the case of the Steele dossier, what should people think about the legal ethics presumably taught at the Duke University School of Law, Elias’ alma mater?

Legal Targets and Political Accusations

Besides his legal practice which he now plies at the Elias Law Group, a firm he founded after leaving his long sojourn at Perkins Coie, Elias heads a feel-good, Democratic-oriented outfit called Democracy Docket. It is not a law firm but rather a convenient platform through which he spouts his brand of democracy and his version of voting as it should be in the United States.

Some of the generalized voting-related issues prominent on Democracy Docket’s website include election administration, voting by mail, voter registration, in-person voting and redistricting litigation.

In turn, delving into these broad areas will reveal a host of issues ripe for Elias-style litigation, including but not limited to: drop boxes for ballots; ballot counting procedures; voter assistance; ballot harvesting; photo identification; signature matching; ballot counting deadlines; polling locations; voting machines; recounts; ballot curing; absentee voting; and purging of voter rolls.

So, at first blush the Elias mindset sounds good until taking a closer look at the content of his writing and his choice words about the Republican Party and its adherents:

  • The Republican Party “wants our electoral system to break.”
  • The Republican Party has “abandoned decency and respect.”
  • Republican “election deniers, vote suppressors, ‘Big Lie’ advocates.”
  • Republicans “seek to fence racial minorities and young voters out of the political process.”
  • So-called “dog whistles … have been replaced by [Republicans] blaring sirens of authoritarianism.”
  • Republicans seeks to benefit “from damaging our democratic system of elections.”

What Lies Ahead?

An Oct. 28 article by the Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Examiner carried the banner “More than 100 election lawsuits threaten to plague 2022 midterm elections and beyond.”

It seems that there is fertile ground ahead for the likes of Marc Elias and other Democratic lawyers to ply their trade. According to the article, “many of the GOP-led challenges seek to challenge new rules for mail-in voting, early voting, vote counting and voter registration.”

One can imagine a smug look on Elias’ face when he pronounced to The New Yorker staff writer, “I really believe that when the history books are written, what they write about our generation will be whether or not we were able to preserve democracy.”

Presumably he meant only his version of democracy!

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Featured

Democratic False Flag Operation Unfurled

By: Jeffrey Winograd

Democrats and the Democratic Party apparatus have appropriated the playbook of espionage tactics to cement their theft of the presidency of the United States.

To compound the electoral catastrophe, the news media and Deep State operatives have joined in the back-stabbing of American democracy.

These joint forces have been waging a nonstop campaign blaming Soviet-style apparatchiks for any irregularities and illegalities in the 2020 presidential election results while casting a blind eye toward the mountain of facts that show Americans are doing this to other Americans.  

Only fools – one might say ignorant adherents of Democratic party – buy into the blame-the-Russkis ploy.

An Actual Conspiracy

The commonly accepted meaning of a false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning blame on a second party.

In the current woke climate, the mere suggestion by supporters of Donald Trump of a domestic election conspiracy is mocked as a fabrication of the far-right.

However, a close examination of the allegations regarding widespread election fraud should not be dismissed in the same cavalier manner as a host of courts, from the county level all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, have chosen to do.

Court of Last Resort

In normal federal jurisprudence, the “court of last resort” in the United States would be the Supreme Court – the court of final appeal in the federal scheme.

At the state level, the court of last resort would be the highest court whatever its name may be.

To date, the highest courts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other jurisdictions where election results are in dispute have side-stepped the factual issues involved.

Those courts have all too often relied on the tried-and-true opinion that the complaining parties lack standing to bring the lawsuit.

The Supreme Court recently took the same stance in the lawsuit brought before it by 18 state attorneys general.

And almost lost in memory is the failure of the Supremes to haul into its chamber the Pennsylvania secretary of state who blatantly ignored orders issued by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to separate mail-in ballots during the vote tabulations.

Standard of Duty

The term duty has a specific legal meaning:

“An obligation imposed by law to conduct oneself in conformance with a certain standard or to act in a particular way.”

With this in mind, it would seem that local and state election officials have a legal duty to ensure the entire election process within their respective jurisdictions is conducted in a scrupulously honest and transparent manner.

At this point, the Constitution must come into play or else it becomes an emasculated document:

“Article I, Section 4 – The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….”

What this means is that a state legislature, not elected officials or bureaucrats at any level, makes the rules that must be followed.

In a number of key battleground states – such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan – the rules were changed without legislative approval.

Remember, the Supreme Court had a pre-Election Day opportunity to address such an issue in Pennsylvania but chose to punt.

Blame The Russians Again

As Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, the news media and the Intelligence Community did in the months leading up to Election Day in 2016, stories began to appear casting a dark shadow over the efforts of Russia to tip the 2020 election to Donald Trump.

According to an Oct. 26, 2020, article on the CNN website by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, among the newest Russian methods of election interference was:

“using high-ranking Republican senators and Trump associates like Rudy Giuliani to push Kremlin-created storylines.”

There are numerous such articles but here is the kicker, in an article published in The New York Times on Oct. 22, 2020, without naming any sources:

“American officials expect that if the presidential race is not called on election night, Russian groups could use their knowledge of local computer systems to deface websites, release nonpublic information or take similar steps that could sow chaos and doubts about the integrity of the results, according to American officials briefed on the intelligence.”

A New Day of Infamy – January 6, 2021

The time of reckoning is now upon the American people.

As each state’s electors gather on Capitol Hill for a joint session of Congress, there will be a sufficient number of representatives and senators, but unfortunately only Republicans, to object to electors from several states and force a debate in their respective chambers.

Will this tip the scales in favor of Donald Trump? Unlikely.

What it will do is place before the American public, perhaps on television and newspaper websites, but most importantly in the Congressional Record which lives on in perpetuity, a complete record of the illegalities, irregularities and dark money that frustrated the will of a majority of eligible legal American voters.

Wake up Americans, Democrats and spineless Republicans are waving a false flag and are willing to inflict far greater damage to our country than the Japanese did at Pearl Harbor, which FDR called “a day of infamy.”

For more in-depth details, visit:

As Congress certifies election, evidence of these voting irregularities looms large | Just The News

Featured

Marc Elias – A 21st Century Democratic Carpetbagger

By: Jeffrey Winograd

Post-American Civil War history teaches us that carpetbaggers were northerners who came to the devastated south to reap private gain under reconstruction governments.

Marc Elias is the 21st century version of a carpetbagger who, instead of being vilified, is being touted by the adoring news media and lapdog Democrats as one of America’s foremost election law attorneys.

Make no mistake, Elias fits the dictionary definition of a carpetbagger as an outsider, especially a nonresident who seeks private gain from an area by meddling in its politics.

For those who need reminding, Marc Elias also was the paymaster behind the “Steele dossier” and the architect of the “Vote By Mail” corruption of American electoral values and law. He knows how to bring the big Democratic bucks into a law firm.

Elias Says Facts Don’t Count

Earlier this month, Elias hit the airways via CNN to lambast President Trump for saying the election results were still not final.

“No, [Trump’s] comment is not true and it’s important for the American public to understand this,” Elias said, adding that it is “well past time for Republican leaders to tell the president and the public” that it is over.

“There is no dispute,” declared Elias, who boasted that the Trump campaign has already lost more than 50 lawsuits.

He then lambasted 18 state attorneys general of the Republican persuasion who have been supportive of Trump’s court battles. “This is shameful in a way we have just not seen in our history in recent years,” pronounced Elias.

“There is only one factual side … [and to say otherwise] is a lie through and through,” he said.

However, the very next day a Wisconsin court boldly stated that there are important facts Elias denies exist.

Wisconsin High Court Sets The Record Straight

The Wisconsin Supreme Court in a December 14 ruling on a lawsuit (Mark Jefferson and the Republican Party of Wisconsin v. Dane County, Wisconsin and Scott McDonell, Dane County Clerk) challenging the legal authority of officials in Dane county (home of the city of Madison) and Gov. Tony Evers to allow voters to declare themselves homebound and “indefinitely confined,” thereby evading the statutory requirement of providing photo identification to receive an absentee ballot.

The lawsuit was filed on March 27 and oral argument was held on September 29.

The court concluded that Wisconsin election law holds that only an individual elector – not a municipal, county or state official – can declare himself “indefinitely confined.” In addition, the governor’s Emergency Order #12, which was a response to COVID-19, did not render all Wisconsin electors as “indefinitely confined.”

The respondents in the case, Dane county and the Dane county clerk, argued that the issue presented was moot, in part because the election occurred and Emergency Order #12 had expired.

The court rejected this, stating:

However, even in cases where an issue is moot, we may nevertheless reach the merits of the dispute. We may do so when “(1) the issue is of great public importance; (2) the situation occurs so frequently that a definitive decision is necessary to guide circuit courts; (3) the issue is likely to arise again and a decision of the court would alleviate uncertainty; or (4) the issue will likely be repeated, but evades appellate review because the appellate review process cannot be completed or even undertaken in time to have a practical effect on the parties.”

It should be noted that there were no outright dissents among the seven justices, only two dissents in part. The court majority prevailed.

Judicial Finaglers

So, having clearly stated that what occurred in the state was outside the bounds of lawful conduct, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, also on December 14, ruled in another lawsuit that the results of the vote tabulation cannot be changed.

In a 4-3 ruling, the court turned thumbs down on Trump’s attempt to toss out some 220,000 absentee ballots cast in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s most Democratic strongholds. Declared the majority of justices:

The challenges raised by the Campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began. Election claims of this type must be brought expeditiously. The Campaign waited until after the election to raise selective challenges that could have been raised long before the election.

The chief justice, who dissented, voiced his frustration, stating:

“[The majority] does not bother addressing what the boards of canvassers did or should have done, and instead, four members of this court throw the cloak of (timing) over numerous problems that will be repeated again and again, until this court has the courage to correct them.”

It would seem that in the Jefferson v. Dane County lawsuit, the initial filing was back in March and with oral arguments in the Wisconsin Supreme Court held on September 29, an expeditious ruling would have overcome the claim that the Trump campaign did not file expeditiously.

Facts See Light Of Day

The Epoch Times, a conservative-leaning, staunchly anti-Chinese Communist Party publication, has been doing yeoman’s work in covering the election dispute,

In early December, the newspaper published an “Election Fraud Allegations: Infographic” which contained a litany of allegations that have never seen the light of day in any courtroom, a situation which has immeasurably tarnished the American judiciary at every level.

Extremely disturbing allegations cited in the infographic ranged from batches of pristine ballots in Georgia that were 98% for Biden to ballots counted multiple times in Michigan to backdating of ballots in Detroit.

However, the infographic was just a primer on electoral abuses compared to a document that was recently released.

The Navarro Report

On December 17, Peter Navarro, director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, published a report titled “The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Election Irregularities.”

The report examined six dimensions of alleged election irregularities in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. 

As described by Navarro, “Evidence used to conduct [the] assessment includes more than 50 lawsuits and judicial rulings, thousands of affidavits and declarations, testimony in a variety of state venues, published analyses by think tanks and legal centers, videos and photos, public comments, and extensive press coverage.”

A matrix outlining the six allegations as they relate to the six battleground states “indicates that significant irregularities occurred across all six battleground states and across all six dimensions of election irregularities,” the report said.  

Elias Unleashes Unprecedented Nationwide Legal Onslaught

As previously reported, Elias, acting under the guise of a lawyerly do-gooder, is the person behind an operation called Democracy Docket.

The website provides a roadmap to its activities, which appear to be funded by the Democratic National Committee and various unidentified deep pockets,   

Elias’s name appears on numerous motions to intervene in lawsuits involving 2020 elections in battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Among the names of law firms appearing along with Elias as an intervenor in various state court cases is Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP. Rather impressive as is one of the leading names frequently cited as an intervenor – Seth Waxman, former solicitor general of the United States under President Clinton. There are no indications that he and various associates are participating pro bono. How much do these guys get per hour?  

Quite striking is the appearance of an article on the Democracy Docket website titled “How Georgia Went Blue” and authored by none other than the infamous Stacy Abrams, the failed candidate for Georgia governor in 2018. Wrote Abrams:

Legislation and litigation, including lawsuits by the indefatigable Marc Elias, began to chip away at the superstructure of suppression. Consent decrees created cure options for voters who sought to vote by mail. Legislative changes neutered “exact match” and slowed the purges for the time being. Other suits improved voter access and education.

Community investment led to drop boxes in 80% of Georgia counties—a direct rebuke to the weaponization of the U.S. Postal Service. Organizations heralded the best practice of making a plan to vote and then helped Georgians make those plans real.

Chutzpah To An Extreme

Bearing in mind that Marc Elias was the paymaster for the Steele dossier, which he has admitted under oath that he could have stopped in its tracks, he probably didn’t even blush when, on December 21, he published an article titled “Profiles in Cowardice.”

Playing off JFK’s “Profiles in Courage,” Elias mocked 17 of the state attorneys general who participated in the lawsuit brought to the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as 126 GOP members of Congress who supported the lawsuit, labeling them, in Yiddish, “schlimazel” (meaning extremely unlucky or inept).

“[They] were like court jesters, just there to bow and scrape in front of Dear Leader for his amusement,” he wrote.   

This comes from a guy who prostrated himself at the feet of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the failed Democratic candidate for president in 2016, and who was a key provider of the funding for the Steele dossier.

Among those who have displayed political courage, wrote Elias, were local election workers and officials “who took pride in the work they did and the elections they ran. They are the real heroes of this election.”

How blessed American democracy would be if Marc Elias were to take his carpetbag full of dirty political and legal trickery and head off into the sunset.

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