SPECIAL -- MM#367 -- Radical Democrats Playing Dirty Pool

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to a special 2024 Mojo Minute, and we are just one just a little over one week past the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump is beginning what could be a major realignment in American politics Not seen since 1932.

0:50 But we wanted to bring you this 2024 election special because down ballot, things are getting a little spicy, I guess, is how we're going to describe it. Are getting a little spicy, I guess, is how we're going to describe it. Down ballot, radical Democrats have their most precious election lawyer on the move and we believe, as always, we're about to see radical Democrats playing some dirty pool. Based on a quick research results yesterday morning, it appears that Democrat election lawyer Mark Elias is indeed involved in the 2024 Pennsylvania Senate race, though right now his exact role is still developing.

1:36 Here is what we can gather Elias has publicly commented on the race over this past weekend, stating on social media the Pennsylvania race is not over more soon. This does suggest that he's taking active interest in the outcome of that Senate seat. Elias is working with Kamala Harris's campaign to raise funds for a potential recount in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Race was called for Republican Dave McCormick, but incumbent Robert or Democrat incumbent, bob Casey, has not yet conceded. Elias's involvement seems to be primarily focused on the recount or challenging the election results, and he is known for his work in election law and post-election litigation for a prethla of Democratic candidates.

2:29 Now there is some controversy surrounding this involvement. Critics argue that Casey's lead is too large to be overcome, or rather that McCormick's lead is too large to be overcome, so we're not sure how this is going to work out. The Republican Senatorial Committee has called for Bob Casey to concede, criticizing the involvement of Elias, describing it as pushing a big lie. It's important to note the situation is still developing and Elias' exact role and to extent of his involvement may change as events unfold.

3:09 But as we say all of this, I'm a political junkie, so I wanted to share with you that we have seen this movie play out before. Now, first, who is Mark Elias? If you're not a political junkie or a political nerd like me, you probably don't know who he is, but Mark Elias is a prominent American attorney who has become one of the most important legal figures for the Democratic Party. Many people are now familiar with George Soros and his funding of radical causes and supporting radical prosecutors, most of which are finally getting voted out of office, thankfully, after wrecking major havoc and destruction on the legal community for the last decade.

3:53 Plus, you can check out Liberty Minute 11, where we did a deep dive into George Soros and his legal shenanigans. So Mark Elias comes from that similar camp, particularly in matters of election law, voting rights and campaign finance, and here's why he is significant. He's handled hundreds of cases involving politics, voting rights, redistricting and successfully arguing four cases before the US Supreme Court and dozens more in state Supreme Courts and US Courts of Appeals. He was general counsel for several high-profile Democratic presidential campaigns Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, john Kerry in 2004, and, obviously, kamala Harris in 2020.

4:43 He's also represented numerous US senators, governors, representatives and other Democratic organizations. In fact, he played a crucial role in the 2020 election cycle. He led over 150 voting rights cases in 30 states, winning more than 120 of them. Now, please note, over half of these cases were dismissed on procedural grounds, not on substance of the litigants' claims. That's an important note. Now, elias has been at the forefront of these efforts to expand voting access and challenge what Democrats view as restrictive voting laws. What Democrats view as restrictive voting laws, particularly, his lawsuits all in 2020, evolved around the expanded mail-in voting that we saw and other voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that's very, very suspect.

5:39 In 2021, as Republican-dominated state legislatures passed new election laws, elias was on the forefront again, filing lawsuit after lawsuit challenging these laws, often within hours of the bills actually being signed. Now, in 2021, he left his position at Perkins Coie to start his own law firm, the Elias Law Group Cohen to start his own law firm. The Elias Law Group Continues to be a key figure in democratic legal strategy, particularly in election law matters. He recently founded the Democracy Docket, a leading digital platform focused on voting rights and election litigation.

6:22 So that's his background, but the case where things got very weird and in fact, some just say very bizarre happened way back in 2008. And thus the reason why we're calling this Special Mojo Minute Democrats' Dirty Pool. Because in 2008, mark Elias played a crucial role in the 2008 Minnesota US Senate election, representing Democratic candidate Al Franken in what became one of the longest, most contentious recounts in all of American electoral history. Here's a brief summary Elias served as the head of Al Franken's legal team during the recount and subsequent legal battle.

7:09 When the initial count was completed on November 18, 2008, franken was still trailing incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman by 215 votes, which triggered a mandatory recount under Minnesota law. Elias led the legal efforts during this recount process, which involved monitoring the hand recount of some 2.9 million ballots across 120 locations in Minnesota Representative Franken's interest before the state canvassing board which made determinations on each challenged ballot.

7:50 Then he appeared before the Minnesota Supreme Court on at least four occasions during the process. In fact, this case is documented in our book of the day. Its title is who's Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put your Vote at Risk, by John Fund and Hans von Sparkowski. Let's go to the book for our first pull quote More Minnesota funny business. Leaving aside felon voting and all the other irregularities, minnesota's majority fund found the recount of the Minnesota vote showed a pattern of double standards in counting and absentee balloting problems throughout, throwing the fairness and completeness of the entire process into doubt.

8:39 After the initial count on election night, al Franken trailed Norm Coleman by 725 votes out of the 2.9 million cast, including approximately 300,000 absentee ballots. So actually let me correct my own. I said 215 votes, so that's bad research on mine. I'll defer to the book here. And 725 votes out of the 2.9 million cast. Back to the book. After the initial canvas, which is the process by which counties resubmit to the Secretary of State the vote totals of local precincts from election day, coleman's lead shrank to only 206 votes.

9:21 Okay, so I was a little bit closer with my research. So the Democratic strategy focused on how to conduct the recount so that the votes could be added to Franken's total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount aggressively, demanding that the votes that had been disqualified for failing to meet legal state requirements be added to his count, while others be denied to Coleman Democrats' dirty pull at work. The team's goldmine was the thousands of absentee ballots that the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Coleman's lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should reevaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken legal team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentee ballots from Franken's leaning Democratic counties.

10:16 By the time this treasure hunt ended, franken was up 312 votes and Coleman was left to file legal briefs to overturn that results. So let's stop right here. Here's the key political nugget of wisdom. The Franken legal team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentee ballots from Franken's leaning Democratic counties in Minnesota. Where did these 1,350 absentee ballots come from? That's the shenanigans we all want to look for, especially in this Pennsylvania Senate seat.

10:57 Back to the book. Under Minnesota law, the only absentee ballots that should have been included in the recount were those that were actually cast in the election. As the state's Assistant Attorney General, keith Roshaki Jr, wrote to the Democratic Secretary of State Rishi on November 17, 2008,. Rejected absentee ballots are not considered as cast in an election. Only the ballots cast in the election and the summary statement certified by the election judges may be considered in the recount process. The Minnesota Code specifies in Section 204C.35, subsection 3.

11:40 In section 204C.35, subsection 3. Now I will spare us all the back and forth as these arguments devolved into each side, detailing what was a counted ballot, what wasn't, what is absentee postmarks, whether or not. It's all detailed in the book. Be sure to check it out if you're interested. But this is how these things happen. When you don't count the early vote or the absentee vote before the actual vote starts, it's just a matter of finding out how many votes, what's the number of total votes you need to exceed, and they just go out and gin them up, they just print them off and they drop them in and say, oh, these are postmarked by the election day.

12:24 A lot of shenanigans. We got to get this dialed in, but let's go back to the book and find out what happened back in 2008. There was no consistency in the board's determinations of the intent, other than that their inconsistent decisions overall seemed to benefit Al Franken. This is the state canvassing board. What Franken understood was that the courts would later be hostile to overruling decisions made by the canvassing board and local election officials, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge in the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel's findings in essence found that Coleman hadn't demonstrated there was a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election, and so they refused to reopen what had been a forbidding tangle of irregularities, including reports of precincts where ballots may have been double counted during the manual recount and returns from one Minneapolis precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount, minneapolis precinct in which some ballots were lost before the manual recount.

13:44 One of the members of the Minnesota canvassing board admitted that there was quote a very good likelihood that there was double counting unquote, but dismissed it as a problem because, quote there was little or very little about it unquote. The board allowed those double votes to be included in the recount, and the courts refused to question that dubious decision. Coleman didn't lose the election so much as he lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the ballots had been cast. The recount cost to both campaigns for legal fees, fundraising, staff and associated expenses was upwards of $20 million, which was an enormous sum.

14:26 Now guess who was front and center of this whole charade in 2008 in Minnesota? You guessed it Our guy, mark Elias. Let's read from the book Coleman's lawyers not only lost the legal battle, they lost the technology battle. The system implemented by the Franken campaign lawyers to record and track all the disputed ballots was quite extensive, far beyond what the Coleman campaign did or what had been done in 2000 in Florida. According to Franken's lead attorney, listen, mark Elias, scanners, laptops and other mobile devices were used to record and keep track of every single disputed ballot in every county in Minnesota.

15:16 Decisions made by local election boards on each ballot were immediately uploaded to a cloud database set up by the campaign so that Elias and his legal team knew exactly what vote totals were for each candidate across the state at every point in time. This gave them a tactical advantage over Coleman's legal team by providing them with information on when to object and not object in individual ballot disputes. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized at the time, after Franken's seating quote modern elections don't end when voters cast their ballots. They only end after the lawyers count them.

16:01 Now we will certainly not dispute that. There are tactics, much like in sports. There are many tactics that run right up to the line of roles on who can do what on where and when and how. You know. For example, in football there's often a phrase said that you could call the holding penalty on the offense or the defense on every play. So it's a very technical term what is holding and how do you enforce that, how the officials force that. But there are times when it's so egregious that you have to throw the flag. That's what we're really talking about here. And when you just find randomly 1,350 absentee ballots out of nowhere, out of thin air, just because they missed a postmark date, that's egregious.

16:53 It has to not be included. You have to follow the letter of the law, because the letter of the law is written by the representatives of the state legislature and that state legislature is there by the consent of the governed of that state. When you don't follow the letter of the law, there's all kinds of shenanigans that happen Now. Furthermore, just this past Monday we read in the same paper, the Wall Street Journal, the editorial section let's grab this quote on what's happening in the Pennsylvania Senate seat as we write this midday, sunday, the state still has some 87,000 provisional ballots to count.

17:35 Provisional means the ballots are in question for one legal reason or another, such as not following proper mail-in ballot procedures or perhaps a question about voter registration. Mr Casey, the Democrat, is claiming this means he could still overcome Mr McCormick, the Republican's lead. That's highly unlikely. About 30,000 provisional ballots are outstanding from Philadelphia and Allegheny County, both Casey strongholds. The others come from the rest of the state where McCormick did better. Mr Casey has won the 7,700 or so provisional ballots counted so far by about 54 to 46 percent.

18:16 If that margin prevails for the rest of the provisional counting, there's no way Mr Casey can win. Mr McCormick's margin could nonetheless fall below the 0.5% which would trigger an automatic recount under state law. His margin as of Sunday midday was slightly above that. That would give wait for it, mr Elias, a chance to try his legal shenanigans, which are likely to run the gamut from challenging votes for Mr McCormick to searching for heretofore wait for it undiscovered ballots for Mr Casey. Mr Elias helped to steal a Senate seat in Minnesota for Al Franken in 2008 by finding a judge to count previously rejected ballots and overturn the lead of Republican Norm Coleman, which we just talked about.

19:07 Back to this Wall Street Journal editorial on Sunday, the Elias method is to look for friendly judges who will roll in his favor. Pennsylvania has a Republican secretary of state who supervises elections, but an equally partisan elected Democratic majority on the state Supreme Court. So far, governor Josh Shapiro and others aren't commenting on Mr Elias. Mr Casey could spare the cost of a recount. He has no fair chance of winning by conceding defeat. Fair chance of winning by conceding defeat that's what Mr McCormick did after it became clear on a recount was triggered that he couldn't win his 2022 GOP primary race against Mehmet Oz, and Mr McCormick trailed in that race by only 700 or 972 votes 40 times fewer than Mr Casey trails right now.

20:05 Watch this week to see if Mr Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, bars Mr McCormick from attending the bipartisan orientation sessions for new senators. That would show he's on board for Mr Elias's election steal attempt. If he bars Mr McCormick, we assume Republicans will call him out for his election denialism. We also await the outraged editorials denouncing this threat as a threat to democracy. And so the steal is on for the Pennsylvania Senate seat, and Mark Elias is in the middle of it playing his dirty pool.

20:48 So as we wrap this out, after the recount where Franken was declared the winner by some 225 votes on January 5th 2009, coleman filed a contest in court. He said Elias, and Elias continued to represent Franken during this phase, which included participating in a seven-week trial in Ramsey County District Court. Elias argued Franken's case through multiple appeals. He dealt with the various legal challenges, including the counting of wrongly rejected absentee ballots. Now here's the real problem Elias represented or. The entire process lasted some eight months, from election day until July 2009, when Franken was finally sworn in as senator, unjustly.

21:37 Elias' successful representation of Franken in this high-profile, extremely close election further cemented his reputation as the top election lawyer and dirty pool export for the radical Democratic Party. On a total side note from this potential election steal for the Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2024, there's now more and more reports that there was some shenanigans in the Wisconsin Senate seat very early on the morning of November 6th. We're getting the accusation that Republican candidate Eric Hovde says there's a whole large batch of votes reported for Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin that was dropped around 4 am on election night.

22:26 Those votes came from Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold. Now absentee ballot counting appears that Wisconsin election laws allow absentee ballots to be processed on the same election day, but often these absentee election ballots are not duly processed in time and they're not vetted as being true votes. So again, dirty, dirty, dirty poll by Democrats. If every state would count their votes like Florida, who's the third most populous state in the country, we wouldn't have anything like this.

23:11 Who's releasing vote counts at 4 am anyhow? Who's watching these people that are counting the votes? Folks, let's make America like Florida for vote counting, so we can have election integrity. So in today's Mojo Minute as the election returns, become final watch for the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin Senate seats to get lawyered up, because Mark Elias is the number two threat to real democracy, much like George Soros is. Our country would do much better when elections end, with the voters casting the ballots and not the lawyers counting them.

23:52 Let's make America like Florida for cleaning up our federal elections so we can avoid the radical Democrats playing dirty pool. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.