Niamh Harris – In a bombshell statement, Powell declared:
“There’s all kind of precedent for fixing what happened in this election from Bush vs. Gore to other cases as well… Fractionalized votes.”
“That’s exactly what we have here from a computer algorithm that we can prove in multiple counties, and it could prove across the country if anybody would issue an order allowing inspection of the machines.”
“The very fact that Dominion and other companies are not allowing inspection of the voting machines ought to tell everybody all they need to know.”
“Federal law calls for election records to be kept for 22 months.”
“In this case, it requires forensic evaluations of the machines and looking at all of the paper ballots.”
“We already know that’s not going to match up.”
“There were counterfeit ballots. People were saying, ‘Oh, well they did a full audit in Georgia.’”
“Well, if you just keep running the same counterfeit bill through the same counting machine, you’re going to get the same result.”
Powell concluded by stating:
“There is enough evidence in the cases before them or enough evidence in the public now to more than reverse the election in at least five states.”
Wnd.com reports: Powell, along with Trump’s former national security adviser Lt. Gen Michael Flynn, had her Twitter account permanently suspended, with the social-media giant citing “behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm.”
In January, the voting machine manufacturer Dominion filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Powell. She’s also named in a $2.7 billion suit by software manufacturer Smartmatic along with Rudy Giuliani, Fox News and several of the network’s leading anchors.
Powell served in the Department of Justice for 10 years and for the last 20 years has devoted her private practice to federal appeals. She was the youngest assistant U.S attorney and later became chief of the appellate section for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas.
On Feb. 22, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch issued dissenting opinions in the court’s decision not to take the Pennsylvania cases. Thomas warned of “catastrophic” consequences if the court doesn’t address the issue of authorities “changing the rules in the middle of the game.”
University of California at Irvine Professor Rick Hasen on his Election Law Blog wrote it’s “a ticking time bomb” that the Supreme Court “is going to have to resolve.”
Hasen wrote: “So why didn’t the court go further in this case? My guess is that it is either the fact that the case is moot (and the court would rather address the issue in the context of a live case, but with lower stakes) or because the Trump cases are somewhat radioactive at the court. Given former President Trump’s continued false statements that the election was stolen, the case would become a further vehicle to argue that the election results were illegitimate. It would thrust the court back in the spotlight on an issue the justices showed repeatedly they wanted to avoid.
“So the bottom line is that the independent state legislature doctrine hangs out there, as a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off in a future case,” he said.
Thomas said the Pennsylvania cases “provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority non-legislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle.”
“The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”
He said there’s little dispute about the facts:
The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘Manner’ of federal elections. … Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various states took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes. The petitions here present a clear example.
The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day. Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day. That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome of any federal election. But that may not be the case in the future.
Alito, joining with Gorsuch in dissent, pointed out that lower courts are divided on the issue.
“In the cases now before us, a statute enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature unequivocally requires that mailed ballots be received by 8 p.m. on election day. … Nevertheless, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court … altered that deadline and ordered that mailed ballots be counted if received up to three days after the election,” he said.
Thomas, in a separate opinion, noted that the Constitution gives each state legislature the authority to determine the “manner” of federal elections.
“Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead,” he wrote.
“This is not a prescription for confidence. Changing the rules in the middle of the game is bad enough. Such rule changes by officials who may lack authority to do so is even worse. When those changes alter election results, they can severely damage the electoral system on which our self-governance so heavily depends. If state officials have the authority they have claimed, we need to make it clear. If not, we need to put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic,” he said.
SF Source News Punch Mar 2021