Name: Federal judge blasts Republican candidates’ request to ‘invalidate’ Massachusetts election results
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Federal judge blasts Republican candidates’ request to ‘invalidate’ Massachusetts election results

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By | A federal judge laid into five failed Massachusetts Republican state and federal candidates who sued the state this week seeking to throw out millions of ballots cast in the Nov. 3 election over their claims that pandemic-related changes to voting laws were “unconstitutional.”“The election happened over a month ago,” U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs said during a status hearing conducted by telephone Tuesday afternoon. “And you’re asking me to invalidate an entire election that just happened, which just strikes me as — it’s not just unfair to me and the courts and the attorney general’s office and too late and misplaced, but just terribly unfair to all the people that showed up to vote in this election in the middle of a pandemic in order to make their voices heard.”Three former congressional hopefuls — 6th District candidate John Paul Moran, 9th District candidate Helen Brady and 5th District candidate Caroline Colarusso — and former GOP state representative candidates Ingrid Centurion and Craig Valdez are representing themselves in the federal lawsuit they filed Monday that names GOP Gov. Charlie Baker and Secretary of State William Galvin, a Democrat.The plaintiffs argue in their complaint that because the state “did not follow the necessary procedures for amending the Constitution” this summer when approving “no-excuse” mail-in voting for the first time and expanding early in-person voting for the Nov. 3 election, those ballots “should be considered invalid and removed from the vote counts.”The group also claims that expanded in-person early voting, which began on Oct. 17 for the Nov. 3 election, gave incumbents “a clearly unequal advantage” coming off the Sept. 1 state primaries — saying it wasn’t enough time for challengers to adequately build up name recognition.Based on those arguments, the plaintiffs estimate that some 2 million of the 3.6 million Massachusetts votes cast in the November election could be invalidated — and “therefore have the possibility of changing the election results” up and down the ballot.The lawsuit also echoes several of the voter fraud claims President Trump has issued in the days and weeks since Election Day, calls for a manual recount over the use of “unreliable” Dominion Voting Systems machines and software in 255 of the state’s 351 cities and towns and raises signature verification issues with mail-in ballots.Moran said during the status hearing Tuesday that he believes the plaintiffs presented a “very, very strong case.”But Burroughs said she was “very skeptical” about the timing of the suit.While the judge said the issues of constitutionality can be litigated, absentee voting rules this year were “set long before the election and you weren’t complaining about that until you lost the election. So I just don’t have a lot of patience for that.”She also said “there’s nothing specific whatsoever in your complaint that leads me to believe there’s going to be any basis for granting a preliminary injunction” to stop Massachusetts from selecting electors and transmitting its certified results to the Electoral College.Still, Burroughs set a hearing on the preliminary injunction for next Thursday, which Moran called a “win.”“I think we made a good case,” Moran said afterward. “It was a win because unlike all these Trump lawsuits being thrown around in courts and getting tossed out left and right, we went from the first hearing to the next level. We definitely have merit.”MassVOTE, a non-partisan nonprofit that works to increase voter participation, called the lawsuit “absurd.”“Similar lawsuits have failed around the country, and they will fail here in Massachusetts,” spokesman Alex Psilakis said. “Instead, we should be focusing on the obvious fact: vote by mail was an unprecedented success here in Massachusetts, and should become the norm moving forward.”Galvin, the secretary of state, has and Beacon Hill lawmakers are looking at extending it at least through June 30 of next year. But Moran, Brady and Colarusso had recently joined a small group of former Republican office-seekers to push back against its continued expansion.Sean Philip Cotter contributed to this report.We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. We reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.Sign up for email newslettersFollow UsMost PopularClose

By | A federal judge laid into five failed Massachusetts Republican state and federal candidates who sued the state this week seeking to throw out millions of ballots cast in the Nov. 3 election over their claims that pandemic-related changes to voting laws were “unconstitutional.”“The election happened over a month ago,” U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs said during a status hearing conducted by telephone Tuesday afternoon. “And you’re asking me to invalidate an entire election that just happened, which just strikes me as — it’s not just unfair to me and the courts and the...

Federal judge blasts Republican candidates’ request to ‘invalidate’ Massachusetts election results

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