Elie Mystal: Dr. Oz's Senate Campaign May Come Back to Haunt Us After All

[Nevilledog]

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Elie Mystal
@ElieNYC
The Supreme Court might step in and indirectly pick Dr. Oz as the winner of the PA GOP Senate primary. And that's about the most dystopian sentence I can write without the help of George Orwell or Margaret Atwood.
My latest in @thenation

thenation.com
Dr. Oz’s Senate Campaign May Come Back to Haunt Us After All
The doctor-turned-GOP candidate has thrown his weight behind an absurd-but-crucial lawsuit that could weaken voting rights in frightening ways.
10:43 AM · Jun 3, 2022

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dr-oz-voting-rights/

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https://archive.ph/2efMO

I regret to inform you that the “Dr. Oz” Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania might actually be important. Currently, television doctor and paranormal enthusiast Mehmet Oz leads hedge fund manager and “Let’s go, Brandon” troll Dave McCormick by 900 votes. McCormick has asked for a recount, and I can only assume that extending this fight over who can be wrong the loudest counts as entertainment in hell.

I don’t care about the outcome for the same reason I don’t care which clown gets to drive the car at the circus, but I do care about the process for determining the winner. Because the process for determining the winner in this election might give the Supreme Court, and justice Samuel Alito specifically, a chance to further vitiate voting rights in this country ahead of the midterm elections.

That’s because of a current shadow-docket Supreme Court case that Oz’s campaign is helping stoke over a local judicial election in Pennsylvania. In that case, Republican judicial candidate David Ritter has asked the court to block the counting of certain votes cast in his November 2021 race against Democrat Zachary Cohen. Ritter is 74 votes ahead of Cohen for the third and final spot for a judgeship in Lehigh County. But, out of around 22,000 votes cast, 257 mail-in ballots were set aside by the county board of elections because the voters had neglected to write the date next to their signature on the outside of their ballot’s envelope. The envelopes had all arrived by Election Day, mind you. And they were also signed. They simply didn’t have a date next to the signature.

The Lehigh County board of elections decided to count the votes. They did so on the logical assumption that, given the fact that the ballots were received by the board of elections by Election Day, they must have been filled out before then. Furthermore, the authenticity of these ballots is not in dispute; they are signed by the voters who mailed them. But they do lack a date on the envelope, and Pennsylvania laws say that the declaration that all voters must sign on the outside of mail-in ballots must be dated. Ritter does not want these votes to be counted, because—it should almost go without saying—he would lose if they were. So he sued the board of elections to prevent it from counting the votes, and the state courts agreed.

*snip*

[Karadeniz]

1. Our judges are very good at zeroing in on the picayune, but not so good at accommodating the

big picture. They too often disregard what should be their primary duty, to safeguard democracy. Any decision making process that disregards this imperative is misguided. Placing the legal weight of a corporation on a par with human beings... undemocratic. Demos means people, not businesses, not money. Invalidating otherwise acceptable votes because a few of them are missing a date...that means that the picayune is more important than allowing those voters to participate in democracy. Caveat: Not a lawyer!