This zombie lawsuit deserves to die
What happened to the last “stolen election” lawsuit in Delaware County?
Six months ago, on Nov. 19, 2021, Ruth Moton, Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom filed a 92page petition with the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas against the Delaware County Election Board and 34 employees and volunteers.
The petition, filed with much fanfare, sought an injunction to preserve all machines) and all records pertaining to the 2020 election to try once again to prove it was somehow rigged here in Delaware County.
But no judge has been assigned to the case or ruled on the injunction request and a month after it was filed, on Dec. 29, 2021, the plaintiffs very quietly withdrew it. No fanfare this time.
Lead plaintiff Ruth Moton, running on the Republican ticket for the 159th State House District (Chester) told me in an email that the lawsuit is still “alive.”
If so, it is deadest “alive” lawsuit I have ever seen.
According to the docket, none of the defendants in this zombie lawsuit have been served and therefore no lawyers have entered appearances for them.
No motions for dismissal, answers or requests for interrogatories or depositions have been filed. No court appearances have been docketed. No hearing dates have been set.
Attorney Thomas J. Carroll, the lawyer whose name is on the petition, can explain better than anyone why the petition is languishing in legal limbo. But he is not returning phone calls or answering emails, at least not from me.
This last of the “Big Lie” lawsuits was filed one full year after the election, 11 months after every other “rigged election” lawsuit filed here and nationwide was laughed out of 60 courts, and 10 months after Joseph R. Biden began occupying the Oval Office.
I don’t think it is any coincidence that it was also filed just a couple weeks after Jim Savage, then the county voting machine warehouse foreman, filed a defamation suit in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court against Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and several others, including at least two plaintiffs in the Moton suit — Stenstrom and Hoopes.
Savage’s lawsuit is very much alive with everyone doing all of those things I listed above. He alleges that he was so physically threatened and vilified, by Hoopes, Stenstrom and others as he carried out his normal duties, that he suffered two heart attacks.
Right around the time the Moton suit was filed, a 20-minute “documentary” featuring two brief videos was posted on YouTube, completely without context, strongly implying that Savage, Election Director Jim Allen and
two others had somehow rigged the election and covered it up.
The “documentary” itself ends with a plea for donations. It is still out there, at the ready to make the blood of any rabid “big lie” believer boil with outrage and dig into their pockets to “support legal struggle against the stolen election of 2020” as one of their websites intones.
For the last five months, ever since the videos surfaced, county council and the Election Board have put up with a barrage of public comments demanding to know why they are not investigating the 2020 election.
Election Board Chairman Gerald Lawrence responded at a public meeting to a comment from a voter who said she had seen the videos and that they “proved”
that the vote count in Delaware County had been rigged.
“I’ve seen the videos, the staff has seen the videos, the district attorney has seen those videos, the attorney general has seen those videos, the U.S. Attorney has seen those videos, every investigation that has taken place showed time and time again that they had nothing to do with reconciling the vote,” Lawrence said.
Indeed, D.A. Jack Stollsteimer sent a letter to county council that was read at its May 18 meeting saying that the Special Investigation Unit of the D.A.’s Office had investigated the allegations raised in the videos and concluded that there was no evidence to substantiate any of them.
Stollsteimer said the videos had been materially edited, taken out of context and mislabeled. In one instance, a video was captioned to misquote Jim Savage as saying, “It’s a felony.” What he actually said was “I’m telling you.”
The district attorney says the video claim that election workers were throwing ballots into a trash can “is a complete fiction.” The claims “were never legitimate allegations” but were an extension of the Big Lie campaign around the country.
County Solicitor William Martin called on the county court system to assign a judge to hear the Moton suit, rule on the county’s preliminary objections to its filing and impose sanctions on Carroll and the plaintiffs for filing a frivolous and sloppy lawsuit.
“For the last four months we’ve had people come up here and they say, ‘Go to the internet, go to the website. It’s all right there. Read it,’” Martin said.
“All I say to you is, in a couple of weeks come back and tell me where I go for an apology that I’m owed, that are owed, that the other 34 people who were slandered by this lawsuit are owed,” he demanded.
Proving the Delaware County election was rigged is not what the game is about. It’s about keeping this issue alive to continue to plant doubts in the minds of voters about the integrity of our elections so that the next time, in 2022 or 2024, the public will be primed to buy into a new, more robust, more carefully planned conspiracy/coup.
And most of all, it is about continuing to raise money from true believers, from Donald Trump on down.
Based on the D.A.’s investigation and the current state of the Moton suit, if I had given any money to anyone to support that particular “struggle,” I think I’d be asking, “Um, what is it you guys are spending my money on exactly?”
Savage’s lawsuit is very much alive with everyone doing all of those things I listed above. He alleges that he was so physically threatened and vilified, by Hoopes, Stenstrom and others as he carried out his normal duties, that he suffered two heart attacks.