One week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review two Pennsylvania cases challenging the validity of votes in the 2020 election, and on Monday it rejected two petitions from attorney Sidney Powell with no explanation.
Powell had promised in the aftermath of the Nov. 3 election to “release the Kraken,” with lawsuits that would blow up the claim that the vote count was legitimate. Her lawsuits were rejected on prodecural grounds, however, and her claims never got traction.
But her confidence that the election was invalid is unshaken. She told Erskine Radio in an interview Saturday that there is “more than enough evidence in the public now to more than reverse the election in at least five states.”
“There’s all kind of precedent for fixing what happened in this election from Bush vs. Gore to other cases as well,” she said, the Gateway Pundit reported.”
Powell said the existence of “fractionalized votes” weighted in favor of Joe Biden, created by a computer algorithm, can be proved in multiple counties. And it could be proved across the country, she said, “if anybody would issue an order allowing inspection of the machines.”
She noted that 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,” she said. “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.”
Here the interview:
She said she cannot begin to describe how upset she is that the courts have not reviewed the evidence and made a judgment.
“It’s incomprehensible,” she said. “There is no rational explanation for not applying the law.”
She noted that more than 5,000 people have signed sworn affidavits as witnesses of election anomalies or fraud.
And in a state that has pulled 177,000 voters off voter rolls, the margin of victory for Biden was less than that.
When Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuit at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was dropped, she lamented that the judges did not review the merits of the case.
“We have just an extraordinary volume of evidence that you wouldn’t even put in the complaint stage of a normal case,” she said at the time.
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.
Via Wnd