McDaniel Has A Legal Path To Victory, Says Consultant

Daily Caller ^ | 06/26/2014 | Neil Munro

[kingattax]

Sen. Thad Cochran’s second-round primary victory may be nullified if Chris McDaniel’s team can show the margin of victory was less than the number of people who wrongly voted in both Democratic and GOP primaries.

“It’s tedious, but it is a simple task [to check and] Mississippi state law is very clear on this,” said Bill Pascoe, a political consultant for Independent Women’s Voice, which backed McDaniel.

Last July, the mayoral election for the state’s fourth largest city, Hattiesburg, was nullified after the losing candidate showed that the 37-vote margin of victory was smaller than the pool of suspect absentee ballots.

Those absentee ballots included 36 that were delivered to the Democratic mayor’s wife, and were later filled out by jail inmates, including a felon who was disbarred from voting.

McDaniel took the first step June 26 to reverse his defeat by asking the Mississippi GOP Chairman Joe Nosef to help McDaniel’s volunteers inspect the so-called “pollbooks.”

Those books record who cast a ballot in the June 3 Democratic primary and in the June 24 Republican primary runoff. If the number of voters have cast ballots in both elections is smaller than Cochran’s margin of victory, Pascoe said, the court will schedule a third election.

[pelican001]

They’ll get over it.

[Uncle Chip]

You sound worried, Haley — and you should be.

[CAluvdubya]

Chris is destroying any future chance he may have at a statewide or national office. Every Republican state official and 43 of the state’s 52 state senators endorsed Cochran. These people have long memories.

Tom McClintock in CA has had to fight for many years against his own state party leaders. It's been a long haul but he's come out on top by not giving up and staying true to his conservativism.

[OldPossum]

I agree with your posts. OldRanchHand seems to think that all should play footsie with the establishment. He does not seem to understand that the conservatives are in a death struggle with those who would destroy America as we once knew it.

[bert]

From what I have seen, while possible, the lilely hood is not probable.

There was evidence of voters that voted in the Dem primary were turned away and not allowed to vote in the Runoff.

[dead]

Those absentee ballots included 36 that were delivered to the Democratic mayor’s wife, and were later filled out by jail inmates, including a felon who was disbarred from voting.

Even when we're talking about Republican voter fraud, some Democrat's gotta be the one-up guy.

[Cboldt]

-- There was evidence of voters that voted in the Dem primary were turned away and not allowed to vote in the Runoff. --

True, that. There is a news report that names a woman who was turned away for just that. At the same time, there are reports that there is evidence of 1,000 voters who voted in the DEM primary and GOP runoff. That makes those votes invalid in the GOP runoff.

It would be unusual if all the evidence swung in one direction. There are more than a quarter million votes, and it would be odd indeed if all the irregularities swung n one direction, or if all the attempts at irregular voting resulted in an invalid ballot being cast.

[livius]

It looks like McDaniel would have won had it not been for the cheating, regardless of how many of the state’s pols supported Cochran, so I can’t see that they’d have much foundation for blacklisting McDaniel in the future.

In any case, the cheating here was so blatant, followed by an embarrassing chorus of black Dem voters congratulating themselves on having “elected” the GOP candidate, that I hate to think Mississippi’s politicians are so corrupt that they will fight to defend this.

[duffee]

So do Mississippi voters, I’ll not vote for any incumbent who supported thad who didn’t step forward and condemn the recruiting of democrats into our primary. I don’t know of any who did.

[livius]

Whether Dem voters got to vote in the GOP run-off or not was probably a function of the election procedures of the particular county in which they were registered. If MS is like the rest of the places I’ve lived, some counties are very careful to check information, some aren’t.

I’m not sure how many irregular voters he actually needs to prove. The margin of victory was about 6,000 votes in the run-off. I don’t know if that means he has to prove 12,000 votes were illegal (because theoretically, the illegal votes could have gone either way) or just find enough to prove that the election was seriously tainted by the illegal votes and thus get it thrown out.

[magellan]

This issue of illegal crossover votes has come up in the past in other elections in other states. In 1986 it happened in the Alabama Democrat Gubernatorial Primary Runoff. Some Republicans who voted in the Republican Primary voted again in the Democrat runoff. In that situation, the crossover law was not clear, and was never enforced. I do not recall any specific vote counts. As I recall, the court made up some excuses and declared the loser of the runoff the winner.

Judges Rule Crossover Vote Affected Governor's Race : Alabama Primary Runoff Invalidated

Anyway, this election was the bomb that destroyed the Democrat Party's hold on the Governor's mansion. Prior to that election, Republicans had to change parties to Democrats for any hope of winning. After that election, there has been only one elected Democrat governor in Alabama.

McDaniel needs to tread carefully here. The paper trails are much better today, and he has legal precedence.

But the question is the same right now for both Cochran and McDaniel.

Can Cochran beat Democrat Travis Childers without the support of McDaniel's supporters? Probably not, because now that the Democrats have exercised their GOTV effort in the Republican runoff, they are no doubt salivating at what they might be able to accomplish in November.

Can McDaniel beat Childers without the support of Cochran's supporters? No way, because the same Democrat GOTV effort which carried Cochran over the line will be used to get Childers elected.

If McDaniel wins the election in court, and loses the general election to Childers, it will put back the TEA party movement. If Cochran loses to Childers, it will actually strengthen the TEA party movement.

I say McDaniel should gently pursue efforts to ensure the election was valid, but ultimately, let Cochran stew in his own juices.

[bert]

You are correct, hence my distinction between possible and probable.

[randita]

Sometimes you have to do the right thing regardless. If more politicians adopted that motto, we’d have more honest politicians and more honest elections.

If McDaniel does nothing, then it will embolden more Cochrans and Democrats to adopt the same strategy in future primaries.

Even if McDaniel is unsuccessful in the endeavor, it sends a message that people are taking notes and taking names and it’s going to be a lot harder to get away with these shenanigans in the future.

[LS]

Wrong. Every piece of evidence we have shows that increasingly the definition of property (i.e., slavery) was driving every single thing the South did. If you're actually interested in evidence, you might look at John C. Calhoun's speech where he said that not only slavery had to be protected, but ANY speech against slavery had to be prohibited (can you say "gay rights"). I don't recall the exact quotation, but it is pretty close that "We need not only the freedom to own our slaves but to own them in peace, free from criticism and attack."

The South's value in slaves was more than all the northern RRs and textile mills put together. If the South could extend slavery into the territories, the DEFINITION of property would sooner or later have to, by law and by logic, be extended back into the north. If the definition of people as people, not property, on the other hand was established in the territories, it would soon creep into the South.

The Confederacy was founded almost solely on slavery, and had THREE separate articles in its constitution protecting slavery. Nope, Lincoln was right.

[Cyclone59]

Since they can tell if a person voted in both primaries for two different candidates, then they are obviously keeping track of who voted for whom. With that being said, they can also develop an electronic voting that would only allow a person to vote once and only once.

[ZULU]

Bingo.

They got away with it there.

Now they did the same thing in Mississippi and Cochran goes unpunished, they will do it AGAIN.

[randita]

Since they can tell if a person voted in both primaries for two different candidates, then they are obviously keeping track of who voted for whom.

That might be possible, but it's not necessary and we're guaranteed that our vote is to be kept private. That's the way it should be because people shouldn't be threatened to vote a certain way with the rationale that "we can find out who you voted for and if it's not the way we want you to vote, you'll pay".

It's enough to find out if there were enough illegal votes that the election could have been swayed had they all voted for Cochran. It may not even require the full 6,000 or so that Cochran won by, but if they did find that many, this election is toast. Because how could anyone prove they didn't all vote for Cochran without sacrificing the privacy of the ballot?

[DrewsMum]

Guys I need help quickly. I have a friend at a county courthouse in MS and she is adding for a copy of the voter rolls, they are charging her 100.00 for the disk if rollsjust fromthe runoff and primary. ...

this can’t be right. Any advice?

[BlueMondaySkipper]

OldRanchHand seems to think that all should play footsie with the establishment. He does not seem to understand...

You give him/her a lot of credit. I suspect he understands exactly what he's saying.

[savedbygrace]

And I was referring to the reporter, not McDaniel.