A cadre of lawyers across the country is ready to be deployed to combat any voting irregularities that might occur Election Day, Cleta Mitchell, president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, tells Newsmax TV.
Mitchell said that a key part of the mission of the RNLA is being committed to “open and fair elections” and to carry out that mission the group organizes volunteer lawyers and trains them in what the voting laws are in their particular location and then put in poll watchers to observe.
Watch the exclusive interview here.
“If they see something that is not being done in accordance with that law, then we have lawyers who can be dispatched to review that and bring it to the attention of the polling officials and if that doesn’t correct the problem, to be able to take it up the chain of command to the election officials’ hierarchy and try to get problems resolved on the ground while the voting process is going on,” she said.
“That is what we do in and around Election Day. Between elections, one of the things the RNLA does is it takes positions one policies and practices and procedures to help clean up the voter rolls and protect the integrity of the election. So what we really are doing – we just do the thing we always do.”
Mitchell said there is no secret plan involved in combating voting irregularities, “it’s really the same thing every election.”
“If there are post-election challenge proceedings or potential proceedings, then you have to have people who are available to go to the polling places, to the precincts, whatever, in accordance with state law to be observers and to provide, really at that point, you really making sure that everything is done in accordance with the law and you are making sure you have witnesses from both parties,” she said.
“You can observe, you can be satisfied that the proper procedures were followed. It’s really not a big secret; it’s just having enough people to be ready to be on call, if needed, to serve as observers, witnesses, and to testify in an event of a problem."
The key to avoiding a protracted post-election legal battle of the type that occurred in Florida in 2000 is not a landslide but a comfortable margin of victory.
“It doesn’t have to be landslide, but it does have to be outside the margin of a recount scenario,” she said. “If you are within or fewer than 1000 voters in any jurisdiction, you’re going to have a protracted recount situation. So we need to make sure that it turns out, for instance, that Ohio does what it did in 2004, when the Democrats had really focused and targeted and zeroed in on Ohio. They thought they were going to make it the Florida of 2004, but it turned out they were not able to do because George W. Bush won Ohio by such a large margin.
“We have to hope for the same thing – that Mitt Romney wins by enough of a margin. I would say outside of a three-five thousand voters. If we can do that – it doesn’t have to be a landside, that’s not necessarily a landslide in a state where millions of votes are cast, but it’s outside of a margin where they can do something post-election to undo the results of the voters on Election Day.”
She noted that because of the legal challenges to Ohio’s voting laws brought by Democrats the state could be problematic. She said the Democrats “don’t like anything at all that helps improve the administration of the election, and they challenge everything.”
“We constantly have to fight back with the unions and the Democrats and their liberal allies who try to completely destroy the streamlining and modernization of the election integrity process,” she added.
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