(C) Daily Montanan
This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



The only voter fraud being perpetuated in Montana is the bogus theory Jacobsen tried • Daily Montanan [1]

['Darrell Ehrlick', 'Joseph Scalia Iii', 'Rick Meis', 'George Ochenski', 'More From Author', 'August', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']

Date: 2024-08-01

When news broke that Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen had changed her office’s approach to counting signatures on ballots, I truly believed it was a case of gray areas and semantics.

Not 16,000 voters (at last count) being ignored.

As much as Americans are consumed by the specter of conspiracies, those conspiracies are like Sasquatches, aliens and Loch Ness monsters — easy to see, impossible to prove (and, rest assured: I’m looking forward to the raft of grainy photos that I’ll receive by suggesting these are more mythology than reality).

The preposterous lie that a presidential election was stolen is unimaginable because of the sheer number of people at the local, state and federal level, all working in cahoots. The lie is premised upon thousands keeping their silence, despite promises of rewards and fame for anyone who had even the slightest evidence of fraud.

But facts, especially in 2024, will not stand in the way of a good story. That’s what Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” of 2020 is — a great story about an orchestrated election theft by the same party that insisted that Joe Biden was sharp and youthful.

Republicans, please pick a narrative and stay with it.

That’s why I originally chalked up a novel approach to counting Montana Constitutional ballot signatures as the opinion of some fresh-faced lawyer looking to help his career and political party by inventing a new legal theory.

I was wrong.

Instead, what we learned is that two lawyers for Jacobsen had been negotiating behind the scenes with Republican lawmakers and candidates on a deal to not count “inactive voters” signatures — a practice that has been done for at least the past 30 years, by both Democrat and Republican Secretaries of State.

That deal was apparently a ruse meant to trick a Lake County judge into blessing the deal, without the knowledge that another case challenging the ballot signatures was brewing just down the road in Helena.

By “agreeing” to not count the signatures, Jacobsen and her attorneys apparently wanted to use the lawsuit in Lake County as a cudgel to beat back the lawsuit in Helena by telling Lewis and Clark District Judge Mike Menahan that Jacobsen must be forced to ignore inactive voters because, well, a deal’s a deal.

That plan fell apart when the Lake County judge vacated the order, clearing the way for Menahan.

We don’t know what exactly transpired behind the scenes leading up to that, though. We don’t know much about that deal among Republicans, which included Montana Speaker of the House Matt Regier, R-Kalispell. And the only comfort, if such a word can even be used, is that the attorneys for the State of Montana from the attorney general’s office also didn’t know about this little end-run around the court.

That’s because the two lawyers for Jacobsen’s office couldn’t be found to testify in the case of the signature counting, even under the threat of a subpoena.

Let that soak in for a second: Attorneys who are working for the state, at taxpayers’ expense, can’t be found on the job … for fear of having to testify in court.

Later, we learned that the two attorneys for Jacobsen now have attorneys of their own, although why they’ve retained counsel is anyone’s guess because, again, the attorneys didn’t bother to show up in court.

Menahan did about the only thing a judge could do in that situation: Issue a temporary restraining order, and sympathize with the state’s attorneys who, unfortunately for them, don’t get to choose their own clients.

The absence of the two attorneys, Clay Leland and Austin James, raises serious questions that, as of right now, don’t have answers. For example, if they were just doing their work on behalf of the Secretary of State’s Office, why do they need representation? And why didn’t they tell the lawyers with the Attorney General’s Office about the whole Lake County scheme?

Which leads me back to the topic of conspiracies — you know, often suspected and almost never proven.

I wanted to believe that Jacobsen, who is a Republican, would transcend the politics, even though her own Montana GOP has positioned itself vociferously against the three ballot measures which looked to cruise to an easy signature threshold.

For nearly the past four years, we’ve heard Republicans fret and fear stolen elections, riling up voters to make a swath of them believe there may be malfeasance, even though the safeguards at the county level are remarkable.

Yet, what we’re witnessing is the Secretary of State apparently colluding with Republican legislators to undermine and discredit legitimate Montana voters. That’s like being OK with your banker taking a few extra dollars out of your checking, you know, for the effort.

In the midst of all these concerns about election integrity and security, it is the very person who is charge of elections statewide who has made an attempt at discounting or ignoring ballot signatures.

Keep in mind that the very attorneys who should be advising her are not hired by the party but state employees, who now need attorneys themselves.

If there’s voter fraud in Montana, there’s mounting evidence that it’s an inside job.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/08/01/the-only-voter-fraud-being-perpetuated-in-montana-is-the-bogus-theory-jacobsen-tried/

Published and (C) by Daily Montanan
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/