Sidney Powell Files Lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia
Nov. 27, 2020 (EIRNS)—Late Wednesday night, Nov. 25, attorney Sidney Powell and her colleagues presented lawsuits to be filed in U.S. district courts in Georgia and Michigan. On Thursday, Twitter blocked tweets to her website containing the documents, and as of Friday evening, the New York Times and Washington Post had refrained from even mentioning them.
The lengthy complaints—75 pages in Michigan and 104 in Georgia—detail fact witness accounts of election fraud at numerous levels in the chain of the election, present expert testimony to the effect that the number of votes counted improperly or questionably is sufficient to shift the outcome of the election or to place it in doubt, raise numerous red flags about the computerized voting systems used, and ask for bold relief.
The requests to the courts include the following: impounding voting machines for inspection, ordering security footage of the main vote counting facilities to be provided, decertifying the election results, declaring that the results are fraudulent, not sending electors to the Electoral College, or even ordering the respective governors to send the votes of Trump electors to the Electoral College. The filings point to the ease of changing votes through the use of Dominion and Smartmatic equipment and raise the potential for internet hacks, which one of their experts claims could have been performed by China and Iran.
The standing is clear: Plaintiffs in the suits include electors for Donald Trump, who were personally directly on the ballot (rather than Donald Trump himself). Named as defendants are the governors and secretaries of state of Georgia and Michigan, as well as various election officials.
As the two documents are quite similar, this overview will largely apply to both:
They open sloppily, with discussion of Dominion and Smartmatic that essentially treats them as the same company, and refers to bugaboo Hugo Chavez as the driving force behind their creation. But then they move on:
The U.S. Constitution provides that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Since the defendants are quite plainly officers of the executive, rather than legislative branch, have “no authority to promulgate a regulation that is directly contrary to an unambiguous statute.” Therefore, changes to the manner of holding the election made by the secretaries of state are “plainly and indisputably unlawful.”
In Georgia, the law makes clear demands that absentee ballots have their time of receipt marked, the name and address verified, and the signature compared to that on file with their voting registration. But the Secretary of State gave new guidance that essentially eliminated signature verification, thus violating the law written by the legislature. The state election board also implemented a rule authorizing the outer envelope of accepted absentee ballots to be opened as of “the third Monday prior to Election Day,” while the law unambiguously states that this can only occur “After the opening of the polls on the day of the primary, election, or runoff.”
In Michigan, the law states that an “election challenger shall be provided a space within a polling place where they can observe the election procedure and each person applying to vote,” to “inspect poll books,” to “remain present during the canvass of votes and until the statement of returns is duly signed and made.” The legislature made clear the importance they attach to the ability to hold a fair election: “It is a felony punishable by up to two years in state prison for any person to prevent the presence of a challenger exercising their rights or to fail to provide a challenger with ‘conveniences for the performance of the[ir] duties.’ ” But this is precisely what happened in numerous incidents, according to “more than one hundred credentialed election challengers” who have “provided sworn affidavits.”
• Fact Witnesses: In both states, fact witnesses affirm that “there had been no meaningful way to review or audit any activity” of recounts (Georgia), that “they were physically pushed away from counting tables by election officials to a distance that was too far to observe the counting” (Michigan), and were generally prevented from freely performing their roles as election challengers to ensure that ballots were properly processed and votes properly counted. Their challenges were ignored, their access restricted.
As for the ballots themselves, a Georgia witness explains that she received a batch of “utterly pristine ballots,” explaining:
“In my 20 years of experience of handling ballots, I observed that the markings for the candidates on these ballots [in a particular batch] were unusually uniform, perhaps even with a ballot-marking device. By my estimate in observing these ballots, approximately 98% constituted votes for Joe Biden.”
In Michigan, a poll challenger observed “tens of thousands of new ballots” brought into the counting room, which “unlike the other ballots ... were brought in from the rear of the room.” Thousands of ballots arrived for which the name of the voter did not appear in the voter registration system. In both states, machines and ballot boxes arrived without proper seals. Backdating was reported in Michigan, and potentially fake ballots in Georgia: “Many batches went 100% for Biden. I also observed that the watermarks on at least 3 ballots were solid gray instead of transparent, leading me to believe the ballot was counterfeit.” A witness has also affirmed having seen “countless workers rescanning the batches without discarding them first,” thereby counting the same paper ballots multiple times.
In Wayne County, Michigan, many credentialed Republican election observers and challengers were not allowed into the facility. In Atlanta, Georgia, reports of a broken water pipe forced the evacuation of the counting facility for several hours, except for 6 and then 3 people, who continued to work on the computers.
• Voting Machines: A computer security expert who read the Dominion manuals concluded that it is possible to configure the scanner in such a way that a significant number of ballots would be marked as unreadable, thereby allowing a human adjudicator to “clarify” the scanned ballot, or even—if an administrator—to delete it altogether.
Democratic officials are cited over the years—going back to 2006—raising concerns about using electronic voting systems, including Senators Warren, Klobuchar, and Wyden, and Representative Pocan writing in December 2019 about their “particularized concerns that secretive and trouble plagued companies have long skimped on security in favor of convenience.”
Voting computers are not actually separated from the internet.
Additional claims about ties to the Venezuelan government (but not Lord Malloch-Brown) are raised. Former Dominion executive Eric Coomer is quoted as having been recorded as saying “Don’t worry. Trump won’t win the election, we fixed that.”
• Expert Witnesses: One expert witness used a phone survey to estimate the total number of mail-in ballots that were not counted, the number of mail-in ballots that had never been requested, and the number requested that had never been received to arrive at totals that exceeded the number of votes that exceeded the margin of votes by which Biden was reported to have bested Trump.
Change of address databases and new registrations in other states similarly revealed tens of thousands of voters who should not have been able to cast a vote by virtue of having moved to another state.
One significant weakness is citing Russell Ramsland, who has included numerous claims in affidavits that are readily identified as false. Ramsland is relied on in the Georgia case for the largest number of improperly counted ballots: 96,600. He is also the source for a claim that there were nearly 300,000 ballots purportedly processed in four Michigan counties than there was physical capability to process. His mindbogglingly amateur mistake of reporting calculated vote numbers based on New York Times election data, accurate only to three significant figures, as though the products were exact, leads him to the wholly unsupported claim to have found fractional votes counted in Michigan.
• Relief: Considering the multiple avenues of fraud, both witnessed directly and imputed through indirect evidence assessed by expert witnesses, the filings request bold relief: decertifying election results, preventing the current election results from being transmitted to the Electoral College, orders to the governors to declare Trump the victor, impounding all voting machines for inspection, a judgment that not verifying signatures violated the law, a judgment that a full recount is required, the production of surveillance footage from the TCF Center and the State Farm Arena, and “other relief as is just and proper.”
