A California nonprofit public benefit corporation and 10 California Congressional candidates filed a federal lawsuit on Jan. 4 against California Secretary of State Alex Padilla and Gov. Gavin Newsom, demanding that they decertify election results from the November 2020 election.
Election Integrity Project California, Inc., and the candidates’ “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief” against Padilla and Newsom and others that was filed in the United States District Court, Central District of California, also asks that an Assembly Bill, certain of Newsom’s executive orders and more be declared unconstitutional, the complaint said.
Plaintiffs, including candidates James P. Bradley, Aja Smith, Eric Early, Alison Hayden, Jeffrey Gorman, Mark Reed, Buzz Patterson, Mike Cargile, Kevin Cookingham and Greg Raths, contend that the November 2020 election results were compromised through “result-changing fraud and irregularities,” the complaint said.
“Plaintiffs have gathered evidence establishing that citizen observers were denied access to ballot processing facilities and barred from observing the remaking of military, damaged or defective ballots, and that validation of signatures on VBM (vote-by-mail) ballots was either not done or done so quickly that it could not have been effective,” the complaint said. “They also show votes being changed, ballots being left unsecured, and in at least one instance, unsealed boxes of ballots being loaded into an election official’s car.”
Plaintiffs are asking, among several things, that defendants “preserve in their current state all voting machines, software, peripherals (including flash drives and other memory storage), computers, reports generated and other data and equipment used to cast, examine, count, tabulate, modify, store or transmit votes or voting data in the November 2020 elections in California for inspection by the Plaintiffs’ experts,” the complaint says. The plaintiffs also ask that certain ballots, including vote-by-mail ballots, be preserved for inspection and that the election results be decertified.
“Due to the imminent possibility of evidence tampering, evidence must be preserved and made available to Plaintiffs’ qualified experts, so that an audit can be conducted to determine the extent and effect of the irregularities and fraud reported,” Election Integrity Project California said on its website.
The complaint also asked that California Assembly Bill 860 be declared unconstitutional. The bill allowed every California voter to be sent a mail-in ballot for the November 2020 election, California Legislative Information said.
Sam Mahood, Padilla’s press secretary, said in a statement to the Southern California Record that the “lawsuit is completely without merit.”
“We have all witnessed the consequences of misinformation and disproven conspiracy theories about our elections,” Mahood said. “There is a baseless disinformation campaign that assaults the free and fair elections at the foundation of our democracy—it should not be elevated or provided a shred of credibility.”