Republicans in Richmond are staying away from talking publicly about the lawsuit filed by two Waynesboro Republicans aimed at blocking the certification of votes cast in the Nov. 5 election.
We reached out to spokespeople for Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Attorney General Jason Miyares and the Virginia Department of Elections, and all declined to comment.
The representatives for Miyares and the Department of Elections declined, citing the matter as being “pending litigation.”
Youngkin’s spokesperson directed us to reach out to Miyares for comment, knowing, I’m sure, that there would be no comment forthcoming from there.
ICYMI: Waynesboro Republicans file suit to pre-emptively challenge Nov. 5 vote count
The suit, filed on Oct. 4 in Waynesboro Circuit Court by Curt Lilly, the chairman of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, and Scott Mares, the board’s vice chairman, seeks a declaration that, among other things, they have a right to hand count ballots cast by city voters, which, no, that wouldn’t open us up to any funny business, having two partisans hand counting the votes.
The suit casts that request in a less threatening light:
“If the Plaintiffs are permitted to hand-count the ballots, then they would be able to check that the voting machine is recording votes accurately,”
Sure, that’s all they’re asking for here.
“I am prohibited from hand counting all paper ballots for all races and all precincts, and I cannot access the ballots without a court order. As a result, I cannot certify that votes have been counted and apportioned correctly by the voting machines,” said Lilly, a program engineer at HDT Global, a Northern Virginia-based federal defense contractor and former columnist for the Lee Enterprises-owned News Virginian, in an affidavit filed with the suit.
Mares, in a separate affidavit that matched Lilly’s word-for-word, raised issue with the security of the voting machines, saying that because “electoral board members are prohibited from evaluating the voting machines’ software, except to observe them and how they appear to operate during the Logic and Accuracy testing, as permitted by the vendor, then I cannot ensure that the machines do not connect to the Internet, allowing for vote counting algorithm manipulation, nor can I ensure with any certainty that the electronic ballot scanners are presenting results which are consistent with the contents of the ballot box.”
The suit was filed on behalf of Lilly and Mares by Front Royal-based attorney Thomas F. Ranieri, who, I’ll note here, is a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason, a bastion of taxpayer-funded far-right legal thought.
From his activity on social media, this Ranieri fellow is also a dedicated Trumper, but from what I can tell from using my google machine, he doesn’t appear to be a connected-type Trumper, if you know what I’m getting at there.
Keep this in mind as you read and digest what’s going on with this.
It’s appearing to me that this Waynesboro lawsuit is two local Republicans and a local-yokel MAGA attorney going rogue, not the first act in some wider plot to test the waters on a scheme to undermine the election.
As I say that, though, I do need to note, if this suit would somehow end up being successful, it would have implications across the Commonwealth.
I base that on another request of the Circuit Court in the suit – that the court declares the current machine canvass “a violation of the Constitution of Virginia,” and that it requires the Department of Elections to “allow observers to monitor, cameras to live stream, and record the counting of the votes with ballots scanned and made available as a public record after the results are certified and posted.”
The reach of this, which sounds like the worst of the Brooks Brothers riot and Rudy Giuliani claiming that a poll worker reaching into her pocket for chewing gum was actually a thumb drive full of fake votes combined, would impact vote counting statewide.
At this writing, I don’t see any hearings scheduled in this case, and given that, at this writing, we’re three weeks and counting to Election Day, and the beginning of the vote counts on Election Night, time would seem to be of the essence.
It’s 100 percent that if the local Circuit Court were to grant the requests of the plaintiffs, we’d see the case go the appeal route, to get it, eventually, to the Virginia Supreme Court in time to allow the Department of Elections to overhaul its directions to electoral boards statewide.
God forbid.
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Chris Graham
