Republicans Strategizing How To Overturn Election Can Use Ideas Democrats Came Up With After 2016

The Left Tried To Overturn The 2016 Election After Trump Won, Demanding A Revote And Petitioning Attorneys General

The left-wing VoicesofMillionsCoalition drafted a Change.org petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to force a “Revote of the 2016 Elections (Primary and General).” The group’s petition stated: “The people of Austria and Ukraine prompted their Supreme Court to overturn their elections following widespread election hacking. We must do the same. Jerroll M. Sanders—legal strategist for a far-reaching citizen revote effort—looked at U.S. law through a new lens and drafted a writ of mandamus that amounts to a solid challenge to the 2016 elections. Citizens across the nation walked into courts and filed the documents drafted by Sanders to safeguard our right to vote. One of the writs filed jointly by three citizen petitioners now sits before the U.S. Supreme Court. The writ asks the Court to declare the 2016 elections (primary and general) unconstitutional because the U.S. Government failed to protect States’ against cyber invasions during the 2016 elections as required by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.  www.revote.org.”

On November 21, 2017, VoicesofMillionsCoalition posted that “Revote Coalition Launches Promising Strategy to Obtain Revote of 2016 Federal Elections” and stated, “Revote Coalition (www.revote.info) has sent requests to several State Attorneys General (AGs) asking them to file a Supreme Court (SCOTUS) case seeking a revote of the 2016 federal elections. AGs are considering the group’s request.” Of course, in the 2020 election, the Coalition encouraged its anti-Trump supporters to vote with paper ballots.

State Supreme Courts have ordered re-votes of contested elections

This time four years ago, in July 2017, the liberal website FiveThirtyEight ran an article headlined “What Happens If The Election Was A Fraud? The Constitution Doesn’t Say?,” which delved into the strategies Democrats could try to use to overturn the election if “Russian interference” was found to have helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. Needless to say, liberals were very much open to the idea of overturning the election results using legislative process. FiveThirtyEight even linked to some examples of cases that could be used to support a re-do of the 2016 presidential election, the way the 1974 Senate election in New Hampshire sparked a re-vote the following year.

In July 2002, the Chicago Tribune ran a headline entitled “Supreme Court doesn’t bar revote in primary” in which staff reporter Christi Parsons reported: “Clearing the way for a new election to correct a faulty Illinois House primary, the state Supreme Court on Friday declined to step in and avert plans to hold the unprecedented revote this fall. As a result, election officials are on course to hold a do-over election Sept. 10 for the West Side Chicago and west suburb House seat. In the initial election, some ballots were not counted, some were lost before an official recount and others were mistakenly cast by voters who didn’t live in the district. A Cook County judge last month ordered a new primary election in the race between Democrats Dorothy Reid and Deborah Graham. On Friday, justices declined to take up a direct appeal of that ruling, leaving an appeals court to hear complaints from Reid. She had been declared the winner after a coin flip to break a tie between her and Graham, opening the door to a court challenge soon after the March primary.”

In 2004, WTHR 13 in Indianapolis reported on the Indiana Supreme Court ordering a new East Chicago mayoral election as a result of fraud. WTHR reported: “The Indiana Supreme Court says supporters of long-time East Chicago Mayor Robert Pastrick bought absentee votes to get him re-elected last year. The state’s highest court Friday ordered a new election because of pervasive corruption in the Democratic primary in which Pastrick defeated George Pabey by 123 votes.”

The Supreme Court of Connecticut in 2006 upheld a lower court’s ruling that an election must be re-done for Middletown city council. The Supreme Court of Connecticut wrote in its decision on Bauer vs. Souto: “This appeal concerns a contested municipal election for the common council of the city of Middletown (council) that was held on November 8, 2005…Following the filing of simultaneous briefs and oral argument before this court, we announced the decision of this court from the bench on December 21, 2005, affirming the trial court’s judgment ordering a new election to be held on January 24, 2006, but reversing the judgment as to the scope of that election. Specifically, we ordered the new election to be citywide, and not limited to district eleven, the district in which the contest arose, as ordered by the trial court…The defendants’ suggestion, made at oral argument in this court, that the new election be limited to those voters who actually voted in the first election in district eleven, is patently unreasonable. There is nothing in our law or in our democratic traditions to suggest that, if a voter does not vote in an election, he or she waives his right to do so when the results of that election prove unreliable and a court orders a new election.”

Legal experts

Back when liberals thought they could overturn the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight reported (emphasis added): “Others (legal scholars) suggest that there is legal precedent for a presidential re-vote if there were flaws in the process. One instance in which this question arose was the “butterfly ballot” from the 2000 election, which may have caused some voters to choose Pat Buchanan when they meant to vote for Al Gore in Palm Beach County, Florida…At least one federal court has suggested that the courts could order a new election. In 1976, a District Court in New York heard a case alleging voter fraud in several urban locations. The court’s opinion maintained that federal courts had a role to play in ensuring free and fair presidential elections, arguing: “It is difficult to imagine a more damaging blow to public confidence in the electoral process than the election of a President whose margin of victory was provided by fraudulent registration or voting, ballot-stuffing or other illegal means.” This assertion challenged the idea that presidential elections occupy a special category beyond such court remedies.” (FiveThirtyEight passage ends)