McDaniel determined to fight to the legal end
by David Atkins
Chris McDaniel is fuming mad and going to fight every vote:
The Tea Party-backed candidate who has refused to concede defeat to Republican U.S. Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi’s primary runoff said his campaign has found more than 1,000 instances of ballots cast by people who were ineligible to vote.
Chris McDaniel said his supporters continue to look for evidence of voters who participated in the state’s Democratic primary on June 3 and then voted in the Republican runoff primary on Tuesday, which would not be permitted by Mississippi law.
“We’ve already found more than 1,000 examples of that in one county alone,” McDaniel said in an interview Thursday night on Fox News’ Hannity show. “We’re talking about widespread irregularities, ineligible voters that should not have been there in the first place.”
In a bitterly fought contest, Cochran edged McDaniel by fewer than 7,000 votes out of more than 370,000 cast – a dramatic increase over the 313,000 votes cast in the earlier primary election.
As I’ve said before, I don’t like open primaries and I sympathize with Republican arguments that they should be allowed to select their candidate within their own caucus. But it’s awfully rich to watch McDaniel explicitly try to disallow every last Democratic vote, almost all of them African-Americans. He’s morally outraged by it:
McDaniel attacked his opponent’s strategy for attracting Democratic voters.
“They were pushed there by an overt action, an aggressive action on the part of Senator Cochran’s campaign that was filled with race-baiting, lies, distortions,” McDaniel said in the television interview.
“He literally ran the latter three weeks on food stamps,” McDaniel added. “He ran on voter suppression, and he ran on pork.”
There’s a large part of me that wants to see Mississippi Republicans get what they want. Most of the “pork” coming in to Mississippi isn’t going to African-American communities: it’s going to well-heeled connected families and corporations, as well as the military. If they want to elect a Senator who will destroy the state by preventing any federal largesse from coming in, who are we to stop them?
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