Courts, Government

RNC Face Plants In Suit To Toss Out Georgia Ballots

Is it good when the judge says you failed in your duty of candor?

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Election Voter SuppressionThe RNC clownsuits have already begun! This afternoon, RNC lawyer Alex Kaufman donned his big red nose and stomped his giant clown shoes all over the federal docket in the Southern District of Georgia. And for it, he got read for filth by Judge R. Stan Baker, a Trump appointee.

“I understand that in today’s day and time, individuals may play fast and loose with the facts, but we don’t do that in this courtroom. When a lawyer speaks, this court expects that the lawyer and their clients present nothing more than the ruth. Our system of justice demands it,” he said from the bench. “Plaintiffs counsel missed that mark in this case.”

The gravamen of the complaint was that election officials in several counties accepted hand-delivered absentee ballots over the weekend, and that is against Georgia law. Or if it is not against the law, other counties did not accept ballots over the weekend, and that violates the Equal Protection Clause.

The problem with the first argument is that Fulton County Superior Court Judge Kevin Farmer already dropkicked it last week, lecturing Kaufman that he was confusing advanced voting with absentee voting. And the problem with the second argument is that slightly different ballot access between counties has never been deemed to violate Equal Protection. Plus the plaintiffs had no idea which counties accepted ballots over the weekend, and which did not — indeed, their complaint alleged that Athens-Clarke County remained open, and its lawyer represented to the Judge Stan Baker that it did not.

But other than that … bang-up job, RNC!

The four-hour hearing was what could charitably be described as a shitshow. Kaufman’s first witness, an RNC official, was unable to explain why his organization was surprised to find election offices open over the weekend. Was this standard practice over several election cycles? (Yes.) Did the counties provide adequate notice that they intended to accept absentee ballots over the weekend? (Also, yes.) He could not say!

His second witness was a Georgia GOP official who testified that she filmed herself trying to observe the receipt of absentee ballots in Fulton County, but was turned away. This appears to have been the result of a mix-up, and within a couple of hours, observers were allowed in. The witness conceded that she was permitted to enter the building once she promised to stop filming, but declined the offer.

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When counsel for Chatham, Cobb, Clarke, Clayton, Gwinnett, and DeKalb Counties were up for argument, they pointed out that the state court had explicitly rejected Kaufman’s interpretation of Georgia law, which turns on a seemingly deliberate confusion of absentee ballots and early voting. They noted that most counties across the state kept the doors open and accepted hand-returned absentee ballots, but the RNC chose only to challenge the practice in seven large, Democratic-leaning counties. And they accused the plaintiffs of forum shopping, since most of the defendant counties were in the Northern District of Georgia, not the Southern.

If that last accusation was correct, the RNC’s plan appears to have backfired in spectacular fashion. From the first, Judge Baker refused to accept that allowing voters to cast ballots had a partisan valance, tut-tutting that referring to them as “Democrat counties” was inappropriate.

When Kaufman and his colleague Dwight Feemster suggested that they believed other counties did not accept ballots over the weekend, the judge chided them for failing to submit evidence.

“You don’t believe it, but there’s no evidence in the record, correct?”

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And when they mumbled that the Georgia statute in question was complicated, he cut them off, saying, “Just because it cuts against your client doesn’t make it difficult?”

After a brief recess, Judge Baker returned to issue his ruling from the bench. He denied the request to segregate the ballots accepted over the weekend for all the reasons: lack of jurisdiction, comity, traditional injunction factors, Purcell principle, laches, lack of evidence, etc. He also read Kaufman and Feemster for filth in a hearing that was telecast live — almost like he knew that this shit matters for a functioning democracy!

In a folksy ruling, read out in his strong Georgia twang, the judge dinged the lawyers for failing to exercise “basic reading comprehension skills,” joking that the defendants would require a “flux capacitor” for time travel to comply with the plaintiffs’ interpretation of the law.

“If you read the entirety of the statute instead of cherry-picking it, you’d realize that the defendants did not violate it at all,” he scolded.

He seemed incredulous that the plaintiffs would demand that legitimate voters who cast their ballot in good faith would have their votes discarded in “Democrat counties,” while voters who did the same in “Republican counties,” who were not named as defendants, would not. How could this not be a violation of Equal Protection, the court wondered.

And he accused the plaintiffs of making arguments that were “factually and legally incorrect” to reinforce false narratives about voting.

“Lawyers’ words matter,” Judge Baker admonished, warning that there could be “fierce repercussions for lawyers who violate that duty of candor.”

And although he declined to impose sanctions, he warned against further shenanigans when the country is on edge.

“Please don’t take us any closer to that ledge,” he concluded.

All in all, it was a helluva day for the vaunted legal machine the RNC spent the past four years building, to the potential exclusion of GOTV efforts. Lara Trump, take a bow!

RNC v. Mahoney [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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