Hans von Spakovksy: Democrat Marc Elias Using Trump’s Argument Against Voting Machines

Marc Elias (Travis Long / Associated Press)
Travis Long / Associated Press

Hans von Spakovsky, the manager of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, mocked Democrat lawyer Marc Elias for claiming faulty voting machines affected a congressional election in New York.

Spakovsky noted that Elias was trying to overturn an apparent Republican victory: “Guess what? He’s out there contesting it, and he’s saying, ‘Why, there’s something wrong with the voting machines there.’ Does that sound familiar?”

As Breitbart News reported earlier this week, Elias is claiming that faulty voting machines, procedural irregularities, and violations of state law are responsible for legitimate votes being denied to Democratic candidate Anthony Brindisi in New York’s 22nd congressional district, who currently appears to be losing by 125 votes to Republican Claudia Tenney.

In a legal filing on behalf of Brindisi, Elias wrote (original emphasis):

In this case, there is reason to believe that voting tabulation machines misread hundreds if not thousands of valid votes as undervotes, (supra at 4), and that these tabulation machine errors disproportionately affected Brindisi, (id.). In addition, Oswego County admitted in a sworn statement to this Court that its tabulation machines were not tested and calibrated in the days leading up to the November 3, 2020 General Election as required by state law and necessary to ensure that the counts generated by tabulation machines are accurate.

These claims mirror those that were made by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign — and which Elias fought in court and in the media.

Elias helped lead Democrats’ efforts in the 2020 election to force the courts to change election rules and procedures in key battleground states.

In 2016, Elias was also responsible for funneling money from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to the Fusion GPS opposition research firm, which produced the fraudulent “Russia dossier.”

As constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has noted, Elias was reportedly present when former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta told Congress that he did not know the campaign was funding Fusion GPS and there was no contractual relationship.

Elias, a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, is also representing Democrat Rita Hart in an appeal directly to the Democrat-run House of Representatives in an effort to overturn the result of the election in Iowa’s second congressional district, which Hart lost to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) by six votes.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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