A few weeks ago, Governor Jay Inslee cruised to reelection by a historic margin, securing about 57% of the vote, just as our polling had forecast that he would. Now, a little more than a month later, Inslee’s defeated Republican opponent Loren Culp is attempting to contest the results of the election in court, baselessly alleging fraud and foul play without so much as a shred of evidence.
Culp and his campaign manager appear to have concluded that by pretending they never lost, they can go on separating fools from their money for months to come, just like the Trumps are doing at the federal level.
So they’re suing Secretary of State Kim Wyman, Washington’s only remaining Republican officeholder, to overturn the election results.
Specifically, they are demanding that a King County Superior Court judge require that Wyman and the existing state government be “enjoined from placing into office any individual claiming to have been elected in the November 3, 2020 general election until the paper ballots, the voting machines, and the voting results have been examined by a forensic auditor approved by plaintiff.”
And no, I’m not making this up.
To file their asinine lawsuit, they turned to one of Tim Eyman’s best buddies: the racist conspiracy theorist Stephen Pidgeon, who has a long history of instigating legal actions that go absolutely nowhere. Eyman and Pidgeon have been teaming up for legal stunts all year long, most of them aimed at disrupting Governor Jay Inslee’s efforts to protect Washingtonians from the threat of COVID-19.
I hope that in addition to dismissing this suit with prejudice, the judge who ends up with this matter sanctions Stephen Pidgeon for wasting the court’s time. Pidgeon should be fined. At least in a court of law, there ought to be consequences for lying and attempting to pass off fabrications as facts.
Culp and Pidgeon don’t have as much as one shred of evidence that the 2020 election was conducted improperly. That’s right, not so much as one shred. Instead, what they have are a big pile of false allegations.
For example, they stupidly allege that the counties’ entirely normal incremental results reporting proves that the results were “anomalous”:
Based on information and belief, there are intolerable voting anomalies found within the general election results in Washington.
Although the Culp campaign prevailed in higher votes than Trump throughout most of the state, the election voter count data collected by Edison Research for the state of Washington during the periods of 11/4/2020 @ 8:11PM through 11/24/2020 @ 4:40PM showed that Trump was leading at the start of the vote counts (11/3/2020 @ 8:11PM), but it was quickly lost to Joe Biden on 11/3/2020 @ 8:21PM, when within 2 minutes, Joe Biden received 81.08% of his winning votes until 11/3/2020 @ 8:22PM.
Anyone who knows anything about election results reporting knows that unofficial elections results change rather quickly in the minutes following the deadline to return ballots. That’s because each county has to upload its initial tabulation to the state, and these uploads never come in at the exact same moment.
Nothing about the results reporting on November 3rd was nefarious or even strange. It was the same familiar pattern we see in pretty much every election. Because a few small very Republican counties were the first to get their tabulations up, anyone looking at vote.wa.gov right after 8 PM would have seen numbers reflective of the vote in a portion of Washington’s rural areas only.
It is a fact that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led in every single count of ballots across the state throughout the entirety of the November 2020 election by a comfortable margin. It is also a fact that Jay Inslee did as well.
Facts, however, do not matter to Loren Culp and his crew. Since they didn’t get the outcome they wanted, they are attacking the process.
They haven’t got a snowball’s chance of chance of overturning the result, but that’s not why they’re doing this. They’re doing this because they want to keep the Culp for Governor con going as long as possible whilst simultaneously undermining the integrity of Washington’s elections.
If this election was within the margin of error, I would understand, but this was called within hours after the polls close.
We don’t have polls in Washington State, just accessible voting centers and same day registration sites.
It was apparent within minutes, not hours, that Inslee was going to win based on the initial returns. Projections, however, have no bearing on the legitimacy of a victory. Only the official, certified returns matter, not who is ahead or by how much on Election Night.
Do you mean the polling margin of error, or the threshold defined in state law for a recount?
Inslee’s margin of victory has no connection to the lack of legitimacy in this case. Inslee could have won by five hundred votes instead of over five hundred thousand, and this suit would still have zero merit. There’s not a single allegation in here with any foundation whatsoever.
Loren Culp needs to stop spreading disinformation.