A Republican woman finally will be certified the winner in the last outstanding House race in the country, and the only way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can stop her is to validate the same, discredited theory former President Donald Trump used to contest the presidential race.
How’s that for karma working against hypocrisy?
The election was in New York’s 22nd Congressional District, where Republican former Rep. Claudia Tenney was trying to regain her seat from Democratic incumbent Anthony Brindisi. The balloting, especially the mail-in part of it, was handled with stunning incompetence. Votes were lost and then found; officials used sticky notes to mark contested ballots only to have the notes fall off; and county elections boards and a trial judge had to wade through numerous other irregularities.
Except for one brief period of just hours, Tenney led in every updated vote count, although, at one time, her lead was down to single digits. Finally, with one last batch of irregularities cleared up, state judge Scott DelConte, a Democrat, ruled late Friday afternoon that the Republican Tenney’s final victory by 109 votes should be certified.
Considering how exhaustive and painstaking was DelConte’s 12-week review of the voting, that really ought to be the end of it. Tenney should be able to retake her seat in the House of Representatives and hold it for the next two years without further challenge. If Pelosi has the slightest bit of integrity, that’s what will happen.
Still, Brindisi and his lawyer sound like they intend to put Pelosi on the spot. They say they intend to appeal to the next level of state courts in New York and also appeal to the House, which is the ultimate judge of its own membership, to throw out the result.
To do so, however, Pelosi would be reopening two of the biggest cans of worms — particularly slimy, large, and poisonous worms — in recent politics. Both come courtesy of Brindisi’s attorney. The first problem is his identity, and the second is his theory for why Tenney’s victory should be thrown out. The lawyer is Mark Elias, a longtime Democratic election-law specialist. Elias, though, was the Hillary Clinton campaign official who dabbled in dark arts when he hired the research firm Fusion GPS to produce what became the bogus “Steele dossier” that thoroughly corrupted part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Perhaps Elias’s long record in election law would allow that transgression to be overlooked, but when combined with his theory of the case in New York’s 22nd District, it’s all too outlandish. Specifically, the theory is — get this — that the voting machines erred in tabulating the votes. Because of a nine-vote discrepancy (to Brindisi’s detriment) in one small batch of ballots, Elias extrapolated that the machines probably made the same number of errors, all against Brindisi, in every other batch of ballots in the state.
That logic alone is absurd. What makes it worse is that the machines whose accuracy Elias is impugning were made by Dominion Voting Systems — the very same outfit that members of Trump’s legal team said was used to somehow steal the election for President Biden. And guess which lawyer led the Democrats’ fight in all contested states to combat Trump’s claim that the presidential race was stolen? Yep, none other than Elias.
So, if Pelosi wants the House to “investigate” and perhaps overrule the New York Democratic judge’s certification of the Republican House victory, she will be using the lawyer who helped create a fraudulent brief against Trump and who now is blaming the same voting systems the lawyer just spent months arguing were perfectly fine in the presidential race.
Under such circumstances, if Pelosi does anything that might unseat Tenney, the speaker would be acting not just hypocritically but corruptly.
