Chris McDaniel’s increasingly-risible challenge of his primary runoff loss to incumbent Thad Cochran has taken a telling and ironic turn. Campaign attorney Mitch Tyner and his wife have turned up in the list of 15,000 “irregular” votes McDaniel’s volunteers say they have found across the state. From Reuters:
The pair voted in the Jackson suburb of Madison, where McDaniel’s camp maintains that improper writing in the poll book, in which voter records are kept, effectively invalidated dozens of votes.
“We turned every single page and every single page had lines through it, lines crossed through names, had words written outside the columns,” said McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch, who added that he personally reviewed the book in question.
That would be the same Mr. Fritsch who faces a grand jury subpoena after admitting to the state Attorney General that he paid Rev. Stevie Fielder to provide false information to conservative blogger Charles C. Johnson, who then published a story claiming that Fielder had received money from the Cochran campaign to buy Democratic votes. His veracity is therefore questionable at best, especially when he apparently can’t spot the names of his fellow campaign staffers in a poll book.
McDaniel’s challenge was denied by the state party last week and has little hope of success in a federal court.