Democrat Lawyer Marc Elias Claims Faulty Voting Machines in New York Race

Attorney Marc E. Elias makes an argument during a hearing on Mark E. Harris v. NC State Bo
Robert Willett/The News & Observer via AP, Pool

Marc Elias, the election lawyer who represented Democratic challenges to state rules throughout the 2020 election, alleged in a court filing this week that a close congressional race in upstate New York was marred by faulty voting machines.

Republicans have been vilified for making similar claims about the 2020 presidential race.

In the congressional race for New York’s 22nd district, Republican Claudia Tenney currently leads incumbent Democrat Anthony Brindisi by a razor-thin margin of 125 votes. Tenney declared victory on Tuesday, though challenges continue.

In a legal filing Monday requesting a manual audit of the election, Elias, whose Perkins Coie law firm is representing Brindisi, argued that there were “substantial errors and irregularities in the conduct of the election.”

Citing alleged discrepancies between votes counted by hand and votes counted by ballot machines, Elias argued that the error rate, extrapolated across the entire district, could mean that thousands of votes were improperly counted by the machines.

He also complained about procedural faults with the conduct of the voting process, alleging failures to comply with New York State election law.

In one passage, he asserted (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.

Elias is also representing defeated Democrat Rita Hart in Iowa’s 1st congressional district, who lost by six votes to Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller Meeks (R-IA). He is asking the Democrat-controlled House to overturn the result of the election and seat Hart, despite certification of the vote by state election authorities, bypassing Iowa courts in the process.

In addition, as Breitbart News has noted, “Elias was responsible for hiring opposition research firm Fusion GPS, on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, [which produced] the fraudulent “Russia dossier” on then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.”

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). His newest e-book is How Not to Be a Sh!thole Country: Lessons from South Africa. 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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