The attorney behind the lawsuit filed by the two Republicans on the Waynesboro Electoral Board who don’t want to certify the Nov. 5 election had a lawsuit ready to file, and just needed electoral-board members willing to put their names to the suit.
“Luckily, I guess, I’m one of them,” said Curt Lilly, the chair of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, in an interview with The News Leader, which buried the lede in a story on the suit, putting this rather important tidbit about how the suit came about deep into its reporting.
Lilly and Scott Mares, the vice chair of the Waynesboro Electoral Board, “luckily” have their names on the suit, filed in Waynesboro Circuit Court on Oct. 4, challenging the vote count in Waynesboro in the Nov. 5 election, which is still three weeks away.
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In the suit, Lilly and Mares declare that “certifying the 2024 election would be a violation of the Virginia Constitution,” and demand that they be given the right to hand count ballots cast in the Nov. 5 election.
“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, a graduate of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason, a bastion of taxpayer-funded conservative legal scholarship.
Ranieri, in an interview on “The Rob Schilling Show,” hosted by the far-right former Charlottesville City Council member on WINA-1070AM, which uses as its selling point that it is the flagship station of UVA Athletics, was shilling – pun not intended, but it works here – for donations to fund the lawsuit, if you want a sense of how things are going there.
Lilly told The News Leader that he met Ranieri “and somebody else at some political event,” and “somehow [they] came up with this logic that there’s a contradiction” regarding voting machines.
“They just needed an electoral board that would support bringing this forward to the judge to say, Hey, there’s a contradiction in the law. What can we do? And luckily, I guess, I’m one of them,” Lilly said.
Mares joined Ranieri on the “Rob Schilling Show” interview, indicated that he “wasn’t even aware” of the theory of the case being advanced by Ranieri, which Mares referred to on the show as “the secret counting thing in the Constitution.”
“I just kind of realized, hey, look, I can’t just keep kind of playing along with this game. I feel, I mean, I don’t know that there’s fraud going on in this, but I’m certain that no one can tell if there’s fraud going on in these machines,” Mares said.
At this writing, no court date has been set in the case, which, for obvious reasons, Ranieri said on “The Rob Schilling Show” he would “prefer to have this settled and handled by the court by Election Day, before Election Day.”
“What I suspect will happen is that we’ll get a hearing before the Election Day. The court will give us a ruling. That ruling will probably be something we disagree with, but we’ll follow the rules. We’ll follow the law, and then, you know, go and proceed to appeal to a higher court,” Ranieri said.
That’s the real goal here, of course, to get this case to the Virginia Supreme Court, and if possible, if there can be some sliver of reason to get it to the Trump-packed U.S. Supreme Court, hey, you never know.
“If we get a precedent-setting decision that the current system of government, the current system of election administration of Virginia, is unconstitutional, there are, you know, some changes will have to be made,” Ranieri said.
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Chris Graham
