Hoo, boy, students of political science will be talking about this one for years...
According to multiple media sources, Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel will file a legal challenge to the GOP Senate primary runoff election in which he narrowly lost to incumbent US Senator Thad Cochran.
Details beyond the Great Orange Colophon...
According to CNN:
State Sen. Chris McDaniel said Friday on CNN's "New Day" that "the integrity of the process matters. We believe on that night of June 24 there were thousands of irregularities and we've already found thousands of irregularities in the process."
[...]
McDaniel alleges that some Democrats who voted in the runoff had previously cast a ballot in their party's Senate primary.
"Right now, we have found we have found more than 5,000 irregularities. There are more than 19,000 absentee ballots we still haven't seen yet," McDaniel told CNN.
Major Tea Party interests are lining up behind McDaniel, just as they did through the campaign. CNN reported:
After last week's runoff, McDaniel's campaign dispatched volunteers across Mississippi to investigate the results in the state's 82 counties.
FreedomWorks, one of the anti-establishment groups that's been supporting McDaniel, dispatched activists to assist the campaign.
Meanwhile, remember True the Vote, the Tea Party offshoot dedicated to identifying voter fraud? Well,
the Jackson Clarion-Ledger tells us that they've joined the fray:
A national voter integrity organization is suing Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann and the state Republican Party for alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, True the Vote says its volunteers were denied access to voting records from counties and that the state Republican Party refused to delay certification of the results until all records were reviewed.
The group is asking a federal judge for an injunction against Hosemann and the GOP so that True the Vote may review all records related to the Republican Party primary runoff for U.S. Senate between incumbent Thad Cochran and challenger Chris McDaniel.
You can
read True the Vote's filing here.
As CBS reported today, McDaniel is already escalating the rhetoric even further (emphasis added):
The Republican who lost a June 24 primary runoff election to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran said Friday he plans to challenge the results and accused Cochran's camp of race baiting in the final weeks of the campaign.
Here we go, folks; this is going to turn into an extremely ugly piece of internecine warfare. I don't see how either Cochran or McDaniel can come out of this unscathed.
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