An analysis by Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger suggests that state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-MS) may not have found enough evidence to overturn the results of the runoff election in which he lost the runoff primary to incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS).
The analysis on Tuesday followed Cochran’s campaign releasing its own tally of votes that seem to be invalid in the runoff. A day earlier McDaniel’s lawyer, Mitch Tyner, said that the McDaniel campaign and McDaniel supporters had found thousands of irregular ballots and projected that they would find enough invalid ballots to close the margin by which Cochran beat McDaniel in the runoff.
Austin Barbour, a top adviser for Cochran’s re-election campaign, released its own tallies of questionable ballots, through the campaign’s own county-by-county search.
“As you will see, the numbers contained in this review are drastically lower than the wild claims made by the McDaniel campaign,” Barbour (pictured) said.
McDaniel’s campaign has not provided specifics on what they’ve found, the Clarion Ledger’s Sam Hall wrote.
“McDaniel’s campaign needs to start making an actual fact-based campaign of accusations if he is going to move forward with his challenge,” Hall wrote.
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t voting irregularities in the runoff, Hall added. Hall continued:
There’s clearly some irregularities out there. There may even be some instances where the Cochran campaign violated federal campaign finance laws. However, none of that would lead to an overturned election. It just wouldn’t, as hard as that may be to accept.
The only thing that will lead to an overturned election is either proof of voter fraud or convincing a judge that the election was so poorly managed the results cannot be trusted. So far, even the circumstantial evidence presented has fallen apart under scrutiny. Now it’s time for hard numbers.
The McDaniel campaign hopes that it can find enough evidence to initiate a new election. But legal experts have cast doubt about whether McDaniel could actually get another election to happen.
