Hillary Clinton’s camp has a lot of odd people on it to be sure, including an illegal alien. But the current general counsel may take the cake.
Marc Elias is the stuff that lawyer jokes are made out of– and he’s the go-to guy for the Democratic party. Did you hear the one about how a lawyer walks into a courtroom because a voter registration group tried to sign dead people up to vote? Oh, wait, that one isn’t a joke…it’s real.
Earlier this year Mr. Elias filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. Their intention was to challenge the state’s new voter ID law, but now they are in a bit of trouble. It seems that the group committed voter fraud in a pretty creative way. They somehow got ahold of a number of driver’s license numbers and social security numbers that people weren’t using anymore. You know, for normal reasons, like they had died.
The local board of elections called shenanigans when things were being reviewed. It turned out that when the voter registrations were looked back over, several of them were made out in eerily similar handwriting. In fact, 25 to 30 of them are being considered fraudulent. Maybe they were just really civically invested ghosts?
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal investigation is investigating the group and, given his recent history in cleaning up voter fraud and his connection to the group, it’s likely that Elias will defend them if need be. Maybe they can get some dead jurors to make thing more fair from a lack-of-mortal-coil perspective.
Clerical errors are to be expected, but all of the registrations in question were newly filled out. Now all of the group’s registrations –all 530– are to be reviewed.
In case you doubt Marc Elias’ arguing skills, know that in a different case of voter fraud where more people had “voted” on paper than had physically showed up, he had them convinced that to check all the ballots would just be a waste of everyone’s time. The dubious election took place for Minnesota governor and the amount of “extra” votes were just about 12,000 –greater than the margin of victory by Democrat, Mark Dayton. Elias said that though the math was impossible, “the time to challenge the voting process is before the election”. He won the case for Dayon– who was named the winner.
While these events seem like the stuff of network television, this kind of scandal-smoothing is probably why a woman like Hillary would draft him for her team.
