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McDaniel Formally Challenges Mississippi Runoff Results

McDaniel Formally Challenges Mississippi Runoff Results

Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel announced at a news conference on Monday that he is formally challenging his runoff loss to Senator Thad Cochran. Cochran won the Mississippi Republican primary runoff in June by 7,667 votes. But McDaniel’s lawyer, Mitch Tyner, argues that 15,000 votes are invalid.

Cochran triumphed largely because he was able to drum up Democratic support, especially from black voters in the state. Mississippi has an open primary, meaning that Democrats who didn’t vote in their party’s primary could participate in the Republican runoff. But McDaniel and other conservative groups have claimed that many Democratic votes should not have been allowed, and that McDaniel is the real winner.

The formal challenge states that election officials “did not maintain proper control of the election process,” and that too many people were allowed to vote via absentee ballot.

Tyner said that the campaign identified 3,500 voters who cast ballots in both primaries (which on its own wouldn’t be enough to invalidate the runoff), and over 10,000 votes that should be invalidated (9,500 questionable votes, and 2,275 improper absentee ballots).

One of those votes belongs to Cochran’s spokesman, Jordan Russell. McDaniel’s challenge states that Russell’s vote is being questioned because “there was no reason given for voting absentee.”

In the news conference, Tyner said that McDaniel doesn’t want another election; he just wants the state Republican executive committee to declare him the winner. McDaniel’s team wants the committee to hold a public hearing on the issue on August 12.

The formal challenge claims that Cochran’s team bought votes, despite a lack of evidence. It also argues that Democrats who plan to vote Democratic in the general election cannot vote in the Republican primary, citing a Mississippi state provision, and that Republicans “suffered a constitutional injury” in the runoff because they have a right to not be associated with Democrats.

Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen is skeptical. As he wrote, before the runoff the provision was widely viewed as “unenforceable,” as there is no way to prove whom a primary voter is thinking of voting for in the general election. “Neither the party nor the court will count [the Democratic votes] as fraud,” he predicted.

McDaniel’s campaign has also made it clear that he specifically wants to question the black votes that went to Cochran. The official press release that his team sent out stated, “Thad Cochran lost Republican votes in the runoff and made up the difference with Democrat votes.” But the original press release, obtained by The Daily Caller, had said “black Democrat” instead of just “Democrat.”

McDaniel’s challenge also suggests that the committee entirely discount the votes from Hinds County, which is 69 percent black, as their regression shows that McDaniel would have won by 25,000 votes without Democratic participation in the county.

The challenge concludes, “The June 24 election was a product of Democrat and unlawful votes. It does not reflect the will of the qualified Republican electors of Mississippi.”

According to Hasen, McDaniel’s odds of being declared the winner are almost nonexistent.

“There is nothing here that meets the standard to show enough fraud in the election to require it to be overturned,” he writes. “At most this shows that the elections were not administered competently in some jurisdictions.”

This isn’t just a local dispute. The Senate Conservatives Fund, of which former Virginia attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is now president, is committed to helping McDaniel challenge Cochran.

“When you look at what they did — the Establishment did — to try to hold onto their power, I mean, they literally adopted Democrat — worst Democrat — tactics,” he told The Washington Examiner. “The race-baiting, the pimping-out welfare and et cetera is what Thad Cochran was doing and the super PAC was doing.”

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

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Poll: 37 Percent Of Mississippi Republicans Would Back Confederacy In Civil War

Poll: 37 Percent Of Mississippi Republicans Would Back Confederacy In Civil War

During state Senator Chris McDaniel’s unsuccessful primary challenge to Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS), he often exhorted his supporters to “reclaim your country again.”

Thanks to a new Public Policy Polling survey, we may have a better idea of what he meant.

The poll, released Tuesday, finds that 37 percent of those who supported McDaniel in the Mississippi Republican primary runoff would support the Confederate states if there were a second Civil War. Just 38 percent would back the United States, and 25 percent were unsure.

Cochran supporters — a group that included many black Democrats — are a bit more patriotic: 61 percent would back the Union, while 22 percent would support the Confederacy and 17 percent are not sure.

Overall, 37 percent of Republicans who voted in the runoff would side with the Confederacy, and 41 percent would side with the United States; 21 percent couldn’t decide.

A smaller, but still significant minority seems to have an appetite for sparking such a conflict; 16 percent of runoff voters support the South seceding from the United States and forming its own country, while 63 percent oppose the idea, and 21 percent are not sure.

One in five McDaniel supporters back secession.

It’s not altogether surprising that many McDaniel supporters are nostalgic for the Confederacy; throughout the campaign, the conservative state senator was forced to distance himself from neo-Confederates and white supremacists.

PPP is known for including provocative questions in its polls, which occasionally toe the line of trolling the respondents. In 2013, for example, the pollster found that racist celebrity chef Paula Deen had a higher favorability in Georgia than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Overall, PPP found that Senator Cochran is in good shape for the general election. He leads former U.S. Rep. Travis Childers, the Democratic nominee, by a 40 to 24 percent margin.

The PPP poll surveyed 501 Republican primary voters, all of whom said they voted in the runoff election. It has a +/- 3.7 percent margin of error.

H/t: Talking Points Memo

Photo: Stuart Seeger via Flickr

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WATCH: McDaniel Calls Mississippi Runoff ‘Most Unethical’ In History

WATCH: McDaniel Calls Mississippi Runoff ‘Most Unethical’ In History

Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel is still not over his narrow loss in the Republican primary runoff between himself and incumbent senator Thad Cochran (R-MS).

Since election night, McDaniel has refused to concede defeat, even though the state Republican Party has certified Cochran as the winner (by 7,667 votes, or 2 percent). Instead, McDaniel and allied Tea Party groups have accused the Cochran campaign of rigging the election through widespread fraud, charging that the incumbent “used leftist tactics to steal the runoff election by soliciting illegal votes from liberal Democrats.”

McDaniel’s accusations — which have yet to be backed by any legitimate evidence — reached their absurd, logical conclusion over the weekend, when the state senator claimed that the runoff was “clearly the most unethical election in the history of this state.”

“Let’s make it very clear today,” McDaniel said at a July 5 rally, as reported by BuzzFeed. “After what we saw the other night, which is clearly the most unethical election in the history of this state…and might…and might…very well be the most illegal election in the history of this state. We will let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike. The people of this state will do anything to preserve the torch of liberty. We will bear any burden, fight any foe, to make sure that corruption is finally rooted out of the election process in this state.”

As BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski points out, it’s hard to imagine that the runoff was less ethical than any Mississippi election between 1875 and 1964, when black Mississipians were denied the right to vote through a combination of discriminatory laws and violent terrorism. But then, it’s not particularly surprising that McDaniel — who spent much of his Senate campaign distancing himself from various white supremacists — isn’t well versed in civil rights history.

Although McDaniel refuses to give up on the Republican primary, the Cochran campaign has already shifted its focus to the general election against former U.S. Rep. Travis Childers (D-MS). Cochran is a heavy favorite to return to Washington for a seventh term in the Senate.

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Conservative Groups Search For Fraud In Mississippi Runoff

Conservative Groups Search For Fraud In Mississippi Runoff

Some conservatives have a problem with the fact that Democrats were the reason that Mississippi senator Thad Cochran beat Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi Republican primary runoff — so they’re doing everything they can to call the results fraudulent.

True the Vote, a group that works to hunt down any evidence of voter fraud — even though it’s very rare — has filed suit with the state of Mississippi so the group can gain access to election records. True the Vote clearly leans Republican, and its directors also run King Street Patriots, a Tea Party group. True the Vote has also worked to stop the recall of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and supported the Florida voter purge. Its record of uncovering actual fraud is weak, at best.

The group claims that it already has evidence of voters who illegally voted in both the Democratic primary and the Republican runoff. Mississippi has an open primary system, but voters cannot vote in both elections.

“True the Vote has been inundated with reports from voters across Mississippi who are outraged to see the integrity of this election being undermined so that politicos can get back to business as usual. Enough is enough,” True the Vote president Catherine Engelbrecht said in a statement.

“This isn’t about personality, party, or politics. Senators come and go.” she continued. “What must withstand the test of time is the integrity of the process by which we elect our representatives and establish our government. No candidate or party should ever be allowed to twist election laws or subvert voters’ rights in the interest of political ambition.”

True the Vote cites the “unusual voter patterns” in the runoff as one of the reasons why there must have been voter fraud, as they don’t think Mississippi Democrats should have anything to do with electing Republican candidates.

Chris McDaniel is also doing what he can to emphasize that he would have won the election if Democrats weren’t involved. In an email to supporters, he wrote, “On June 24th, we won the Republican primary election. As you might have heard, we’re not quite done. We are in the process of trying to ensure a fair and accurate election took place on Tuesday.”

The McDaniel campaign is currently searching through election books in a futile attempt to find enough irregular votes to invalidate Cochran’s win. So far, they claim that they’ve found more than 3,300 suspicious votes after examining less than half of Mississippi’s counties.

The Cochran campaign dismissed these numbers. “Their numbers are wildly exaggerated,” Cochran campaign spokesman Jordan Russell told the Sun Herald. “For instance, in one county where they say they found 200 illegal votes, only 37 Democrats voted on June 3.”

But the McDaniel campaign’s strategy isn’t just to prove that there was voter fraud — it’s to create enough of a frenzy to force yet another runoff election.

“We don’t have to prove that we have 7,000 [invalid] votes … all there needs to be is enough doubt about the election, and we’re confident about that,” Noel Fritsch, McDaniel’s press aide, said to Fox News.

So conservative groups are trying their best to create that atmosphere of “doubt.” The Mississippi Tea Party says that it found at least 800 illegal votes in heavily Democratic Hinds County (where McDaniel’s campaign says it’s found 1,500 such votes).

Tea Party group FreedomWorks is calling on the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the Cochran campaign after RedState.com released an interview with a reverend who says that Cochran’s campaign paid him to give black voters $15 to vote for Cochran. However, the reverend was paid to do the interview, and the Cochran campaign called his allegations “baseless and false.”

Meanwhile, the far right’s vendetta against Cochran and Mississippi Democrats will likely serve to continue to alienate minority voters.

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

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