It’s time to certify the winner of #NY22. Here’s my campaign statement on the completion of the final canvass of votes. pic.twitter.com/3Wx8AmkcKz
— Claudia Tenney (@claudiatenney) February 2, 2021
Perkins Coie, a white-shoe law firm that has spent months fighting cases brought by states and the Trump campaign that alleged massive election fraud facilitated by the alleged switching of votes by ballot machines has filed a brief in support of a candidate that makes the very same allegations.
Anthony Brandisi a Democrat candidate for U.S. Congress is suing his opponent incumbent Republican Claudia Tenney to prevent the certification of votes in their race for the seat in New York’s 22nd Congressional district, an upstate district covering Utica, Rome, Binghamton and other areas.
The brief by Perkins Coie, filed in support of Brandisi, says there were “nine changed votes” during the second and third canvasses of one county’s rejected affidavit and absentee ballots. In a race were 325,548 votes were cast. That translates into an error rate of 0.8% or about 3,000 votes, a wide enough margin to put the results of the race in question.
Tenney currently leads Brandisi by 122 votes.
Remarkably, the brief asks a court to delay certification of the results and a full hand audit of ballots in question, moves Perkins Coie has been fighting against in other states for months.
The lead lawyer on the brief is Marc Elias.
Attorney Marc Elias on election fraud cases: “What we’re seeing now in this litigation is not cases that are going to change the outcome but rather, cases that will undermine confidence that some people have in the outcome of the election which is really dangerous for democracy” pic.twitter.com/776XDlx6OD
— CNN (@CNN) December 9, 2020
Elias has been accused of engineering an unconstitutional agreement in Georgia that made it much more difficult for absentee ballots to be rejected based on unverifiable information in that state.
Perkins Coie also has a deep history with the Democratic National Committee. The firm represented the Hillary Clinton campaign for president in 2016. It was Perkins Coie that hired political research firm Fushion GPS to conduct opposition research on the 2016 Trump campaign.
Fushion would in turn fund the work of British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, author of the now-infamous (and debunked) Steele Dossier, the intelligence report that claimed Donald Trump was groomed and compromised by the Russian government.