A federal judge on Monday dismissed the “Kraken” election fraud
lawsuit filed in Georgia by attorney Sidney Powell, who sought to
decertify the Georgia presidential election results declaring
former Vice President Joe Biden the winner.
Judge Timothy Batten of the U.S. District Court for the Northern
District of Georgia listened to arguments for a little more than an
hour before ruling from the bench to grant a motion to dismiss from
lawyers for the state of Georgia,
WSB-TV reported. He said that this sort of case belongs in
state court, not federal court, that the plaintiffs lacked
standing, and that Powell waited too long to file her complaint
about Dominion Voting Systems machines.
“The courts have convincingly held that these types of cases are
not properly before federal courts. These are state elections.
State courts should evaluate these proceedings from start to
finish,” Batten said.
“Moreover, the plaintiffs simply do not having standing to bring
these claims,” he added.
“Additionally, I find that the plaintiffs waited too long to
file this suit,” Batten said. “Their primary complaint involves the
Dominion ballot marking devices. They say those machines are
susceptible to fraud. There is no reason they could not have
followed the administrative procedure act to the rule-making
authority that had been exercised by the Secretary of
State.”
“This suit could have been filed months ago at the time these
machines were adopted,” Batten concluded. “Instead the plaintiffs
waited until over three weeks after the election to file the suit.
There’s no question in my mind that if I were to deny the motion to
dismiss, the matter would be brought before the 11th Circuit, and
the 11th Circuit would reverse me.”
Powell in recent weeks
claimed that her “massive” lawsuit would “save” the Trump
presidency by uncovering evidence of a widespread conspiracy to
commit election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She
alleged, among several other claims, that international and
domestic persons used Dominion Voting Systems, the company that
manufactures the voting machines in Georgia, to fix the election by
switching votes for Trump to Biden.
In arguing to have the case dismissed, the defendants pointed
out that Georgia has certified its election results three times:
Once after the first count, a second time in a hand-counted audit
of the 5 million ballots cast, and a
third recount that confirmed the results from the previous
two.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
said Monday that he will recertify the state election results,
confirming that Joe Biden won Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes.
“Today the Secretary of State’s office will be re-certifying our
state’s election results,” Raffensperger said. “Then the safe
harbor under the United States Code to name electors is tomorrow,
and then they will meet on December 14th to officially elect the
next president.”
Additionally, a federal judge in Michigan
denied an emergency request filed by Powell to overturn the
election in that state, making similar arguments about the timing
of Powell’s lawsuit and the complaint being moot and adding that
the court lacks the power to overturn an election.
“Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory
scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of
millions of voters,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker wrote in her
36-page opinion. “This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.”
Parker also said that “the ship has sailed” on this case and
that the lawsuit was filed too late.
“Plaintiffs could have lodged their constitutional challenges
much sooner than they did, and certainly not three weeks after
Election Day and one week after certification of almost three
million votes,” Parker wrote.
She also criticized the allegations of fraud made in Powell’s
affidavits as “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and
speculation that such alterations were possible” (emphasis
hers).
“With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for
President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for
Vice President Biden, plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails,”
her opinion stated.
On Nov. 22 before this lawsuit was filed, President Trump’s
legal team
distanced itself from Powell in a statement making clear that
she “is practicing law on her own” and “is not a member of the
Trump legal team,” despite the fact that she appeared with Trump’s
personal attorney Rudy Giuliani
in a press conference just days earlier.
