Overturning Elections, the Pelosi Way

For John, BLUF:  It isn't just Republicans who are contesting the outcomes of elections.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Now Who’s Contesting Elections?

Here is the sub-headline:

The Democratic House could overturn results in Iowa and New York

From The Wall Street Journal, by The Editorial Board, 4 December 2020.

Here is the lede plus six:

Donald Trump’s campaign against the 2020 Presidential outcome undermines political legitimacy, but no side is blameless in America’s partisan election escalation.  Witness the new Democratic effort to overturn the election result in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District—which could be emulated in New York’s 22nd if Republicans win there too.

Iowa’s state elections board on Monday certified Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s victory in the 2nd district, flipping a seat currently held by a Democrat.  But her opponent, Rita Hart, is dusting off a 1969 federal statute to have the House of Representatives pick the winner. That means Democrats in Washington could overrule Iowa voters to seat a co-partisan and grow their majority.

The Iowa race was decided by six votes. The counting went on for weeks as 24 counties canvassed and recanvassed over 390,000 ballots, and lawyers from both sides haggled with election officials over machine counting, ballot qualifications and voter intent.

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.

And on it goes.

Haven't we heard the name Perkins Coie before?  Ah, the Steele Dossier.  Which is rubbish and a blight on the reputation of the FBI.  Where is a John Durham when you need one?

When will the People get involved?  By that I mean at the Polls, in 2022.

Regards  —  Cliff