Historic Judicial Watch Victory: Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Counting of Ballots Received after Election Day
Records Confirm Agent on Harris Secret Service Detail Broke into Massachusetts Hair Salon, Taped over Security Camera
Judicial Watch Sends Election Monitors to Wisconsin, Launches National Voter Fraud Hotline
Mass Migration Ignites U.S. Tuberculosis Resurgence, Foreigners Account for 76% of Last Year’s Cases
Historic Judicial Watch Victory: Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Counting of Ballots Received after Election Day
In a huge victory for election integrity, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion reversing a lower court ruling on Mississippi’s election law that permitted absentee ballots to be received as late as five business days after Election Day.
Earlier this year, your Judicial Watch filed a civil rights lawsuit challenging the Mississippi election law on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi (Libertarian Party of Mississippi v Wetzel et al. (No. 1:24-cv-00037)). The court consolidated the case we filed with one filed by the Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and other complainants.
(Judicial Watch filed the first challenge to require all ballots be received by Election Day in 2022 against Illinois.)
The Fifth Circuit opinion states in part:
Congress statutorily designated a singular “day for the election” of members of Congress and the appointment of presidential electors. Text, precedent, and historical practice confirm this “day for the election” is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials. Because Mississippi’s statute allows ballot receipt up to five days after the federal election day, it is preempted by federal law. We reverse the district court’s contrary judgment and remand for further proceedings.
We argued that holding voting open for five days past Election Day violates the constitutional rights of voters and candidates:
Counting untimely, illegal, and invalid votes, such as those received in violation of federal law, substantially increases the pool of total votes cast and dilutes the weight of votes cast by Plaintiff’s members and others in support of Plaintiff’s federal nominees.
The complaint details that as many as 1.7% of votes cast in Mississippi in 2020 were received after Election Day.
In our appeal filings, we explained that the Mississippi law extending Election Day is obviously at odds with federal law. The Fifth Circuit hearing can be found here. This is a historic victory for election integrity and voter rights and confidence. This is a precedent that ensures that only ballots that arrive by Election Day can be counted under federal law. We hope this begins a national movement to increase voter confidence, comply with federal law, and limit voter fraud by counting ballots that arrive only by Election Day.
We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.
Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
In a similar lawsuit, in 2022,we, on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered voters, sued Illinois for allowing vote-by-mail ballots (even those without postmarks) to be counted if received up to 14 calendar days after Election Day if the ballots are dated on or before Election Day.
In May 2024, we sued California under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) to force it to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).
In March 2024, we, Breakthrough Ideas, Illinois Family Action, and Carol J. Davis sued Illinois officials under the NVRA to force them to clean the State’s voter rolls. (Judicial Watch Inc., et al., v. Illinois State Board of Elections, et al. (No. 1:24-cv-01867).
In December 2023, a notice letter was sent to election officials in the District of Columbia notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. The letter pointed out that D.C. publicly reported removing few or no ineligible voter registrations under a key provision of the NVRA. The letter threatened a federal lawsuit unless the violations were corrected in a timely fashion. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, DC, officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”
In July 2023 we filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.
Judicial Watch in July 2023 also settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, which now grants access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state for the past 15 elections.
In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with us and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from us. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.
In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle our NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide us with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.
In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed the removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since last year, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit we filed in 2017.
We settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.
Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.
In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.
This case and other pending cases are far from over. The legal battles to ensure election integrity will continue with Judicial Watch in the lead as long as the need remains …
Records Confirm Agent on Harris Secret Service Detail Broke into Massachusetts Hair Salon, Taped over Security Camera
We just uncovered 62 pages of records from the Department of Homeland Security thanks to a FOIA lawsuit that shows, contrary to what it told the media, at least one U.S. Secret Service agent broke into a hair salon and taped over the salon’s security camera in Pittsfield, MA, during a July 27, 2024, campaign fundraising visit by Vice President Kamala Harris
The records also show one agent telling colleagues that by covering the hair salon’s external security camera with tape, the Secret Service was laughably pretending to be “mitigating threats.”
We filed the lawsuit here in Washington DC after the Secret Service failed to respond to an August 2024 FOIA request for records regarding the break-in by vice presidential protective detail (Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (No,1:24-cv–02750)).
The New York Post reported on August 11: “The Secret Service apologized to a salon owner in Massachusetts who alleged that individuals broke into her business to use the bathroom during the agency’s security work for a nearby Veep Kamala Harris fundraiser…. [A] Secret Service officer covered a camera outside her salon with tape.”
A Secret Service agent in the New York Field Office states in a July 28, 2024, email to an official on Harris’s detail whose name is redacted:
The owner [redacted] called the NYC Duty Desk stating she has pictures of agents going into the house, covering up cameras and using the bathroom. The address in question is 54 Wendell Ave., Pittsfield, MA 01201. She just wanted to know who had given permission to go inside and use the space.
The Harris detail official forwards the email to an official in the “TSD,” Technical Security Division.
A Technical Security Division official whose name is redacted reports:
The building in question is [redacted]. It was a multi-story building with a salon on the ground floor, and residences above. I entered the day prior during working hours to ask one of the employees about [redacted]. I have no knowledge of any of the teams assigned to TSD entering the building at any time. [Redacted]
At least one of the residents were on the property and I saw them out on the balcony multiple times. I have no idea if they might have given someone permission to enter to use the bathroom. SA [special agent] [redacted] advised that [redacted].
I don’t know the extent of the issues the owner has, just what you see in his forwarded thread. If any further information is necessary, please let me know.
The message is forwarded to another official in the vice president’s detail and the sender states:
See below from TSI [technical security investigators] [redacted] the TSD lead for the visit.
Also I was informed after the visit by the Arrival Departure agent (SA) [redacted] that local PD [police department] were utilizing the bathroom within the building. VPD [vice presidential division] did not give permission to use this facility. However, local PD did seem to have a relationship with facility owner and stated they have worked together before! I was made aware that potentially one Agent may have used the facility as well which was the site 2 PI [protective intelligence] agent (SA) [redacted] which was paired with his local PD counterpart.
CSP [critical systems protection] Agent [redacted] informed us of camera vulnerabilities located on the hair salon facing the A/D [area/departure] area. I was informed that attempts were made to contact owners but unsuccessful. Day of the visit SA [redacted] mitigated threats due to covering the exterior camera.
The email thread works its way up to Brian Lambert, assistant director, Office of Investigations, who then writes to Michael Ball of the Investigations Division, asking, “Can you please check work [sic] BOS [Secret Service Boston Field Office] to see if that SA used the bathroom?” Ball replies, “Copy.”
In a July 30, 2024, email exchange a Boston Secret Service official asks a Pittsfield official whose name is redacted: “Sir, Please take a look. See if you know anyone in the video. I only know the woman who put the tape on the camera.”
The redacted individual responds: “Doesn’t look like anyone of your people! Other than the female with the tape.”
In an August 5, 2024, email exchange between an assistant special agent in charge of the Secret Service Boston Field Office and a local police chief, the police chief confirms that at least one agent was in the hair salon, along with local officials. The Boston agent writes, “Hi Chief, Hope all is going well in Pittsfield. I am about to hit the road for Philadelphia for a week or so. Quick question for you. Regarding the video from the salon … were the individuals who went inside ever identified?” The police chief responds, “After I reviewed it, it appears 2 females were EMS County ambulance, 1 USSS [Secret Service] agent and 1 state police CERT [Community Emergency Response Team] member. Hope all is well!”
In an August 6, 2024, email from Business Insider reporter Jacob Shamsian to the Secret Service Media Inquiry Department:
I spoke to [redacted] the owner of the Four One Three Salon in Pittsfield. She told me that on the day of Harris’s visit, on July 27, she closed down her salon, which is located just behind the Colonial Theatre where Harris held a fundraiser.
She said that a Secret Service agent taped over the exterior security camera of her salon. And then a couple of hours later, her lock was picked and several people – including one person wearing a Secret Service uniform – entered the salon to use the bathroom. They left the door unlocked when they left.
Security footage that [redacted] shared with me backs up her version of events.
[The owner] told me that she later spoke to an EMT [Emergency Medical Technician], who told her that the ‘person in charge’ of the Secret Service that day told people to use her bathroom’s salon [sic]. She said she spoke to someone at a Secret Service field office (it wasn’t clear to me if it was the Massachusetts or New York field office – Pittsfield is in Massachusetts just across the border from New York), who blamed the local police.
The reporter, Shamsian, poses a series of questions that the Secret Service answers in the email chain.
When asked if a Secret Service officer picked the lock of the salon, Secret Service replies, “No one from the USSS picked the lock of the Salon door.”
When asked if the Secret Service sought permission from a person whose name is redacted or the property owner to “use the facility for the bathroom or any other reason,” the Boston Secret Service replies, “USSS personnel did not ask for permission to enter the Salon nor did any of our personnel enter the business. We reviewed the videos provided to us and observed that none of the individuals who entered the Salon were USSS personnel. The Pittsfield Police Chief confirmed those individuals were state or local police, fire or EMS.”
When asked if the Secret Service agent in charge – or any other officer – told others to use the bathroom, the Secret Service replied, “No one from the USSS directed any state or local personnel to enter the Salon or use the restrooms.”
On August 6, 2024, the Special Agent-in-Charge of the Boston Field Office, Andrew Murphy, sends an email to a colleague in the Office of Protective Services (OPS) whose name is redacted, ordering him to, “Please send me the names of every BOS personnel working the [redacted] visit to Pittsfield. This information is time sensitive.”
The reply from the official is redacted. Murphy then responds, “Thank you. Can you please provide me with the names of the duty agents from the 27th of July through today.”
In an August 7, 2024, email with the subject line “Draft PreDecisional Statement” includes news articles sent by Vincent Tutoni, assistant director for Intergovernmental and Legislative Affairs, to Communications Director Anthony Guglielmi and others:” So DHS front office is interested in this unfortunate incident. Received a call last night at 8:45pm. We will have to confer with them this AM.”
Guglielmi replies, “Got it. Let us know. [Redacted] asked reporter for some time 11am. Salon owner had a previously scheduled interview today also with the local paper.
On August 12, Acting Director Ronald Rowe receives an email from a person whose name is redacted asking, “Will the Agent who broke into the salon in Mass be disciplined? Will the Agent in charge be disciplined for breaking into the salon?”
The Biden-Harris Secret Service is unprofessional, dishonest, and corrupt. The Secret Service not only broke into a business to use its bathroom but then lied about it, placing the blame on local law enforcement.
We have extensively sued and investigated the Secret Service on transparency and corruption issues.
My new book, Rights and Freedoms in Peril, details some of our numerous lawsuits and disclosures about Secret Service controversies.
Recently, we sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for records on a 2022 car accident involving Vice President Kamala Harris’s Secret Service motorcade. The New York Post reported in October 2022 that “Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a minor car accident Monday, one that was initially — and falsely — dismissed as ‘mechanical failure.’” The driver of her SUV struck a curb hard enough “that the tire needed to be replaced, bringing the VP’s motorcade to a standstill.” NBC reported that the vehicle had been partially airborne.
In September, following up on reports that the Biden Secret Service denied President Trump’s requests for additional Secret Service protection, we sued the Department of Homeland Security for all Secret Service and other records regarding potential increased protective services to former President Trump’s security detail prior to the attempt on his life at his July 13 campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In August we released records showing that the Secret Service has made it a top priority that “diversity and inclusion is not just ‘talked about’ – but demonstrated by all employees through ‘Every Action, Every Day.’” [Emphasis in original] The records show the Secret Service demands that 12 percent of its workforce be composed of “persons with disabilities,” and that it is the policy of the Secret Service to provide equal employment opportunity without regard to such non-merit factors as “disability (physical or mental).”
Judicial Watch Sends Election Monitors to Wisconsin, Launches National Voter Fraud Hotline
Every day brings new reports of outright election fraud in states and cities across the country. We have always been out front in uncovering election abuses, and we’re active this season. Micah Morrison, our chief investigative reporter, provides an important update in Judicial Watch’s Investigative Bulletin.
With the race for the presidency hurtling to the finish line, Judicial Watch will dispatch an election integrity team to Wisconsin to help ensure free and fair elections. Wisconsin is a critical swing state with a history of tumultuous electoral contests. “Judicial Watch’s teams will monitor the election in Wisconsin to expose and deter any fraud,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Improper or illegal election activities are also the focus of Judicial Watch’s new Election Integrity Hotline. Voters who witness fraud or intimidation, or suspicious activities at polling places or with voting machines, can send details to JW election experts at ElectionLaw@JudicialWatch.org.
Judicial Watch has long been a national leader in ensuring election integrity and voting rights. Judicial Watch’s election integrity team is led by Robert Popper, the former deputy chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and a veteran poll observer.
“Voter fraud in one form or another is a feature of every election,” Popper says. “It can be impersonation fraud, absentee ballot fraud, registration fraud, double voting, noncitizen voting, or voting by those ineligible under state law. It’s hard to detect and prove, especially where the law requires a showing of specific intent, but we know it is there. And sometimes fraud can swing a close election. Clean elections are a critical component of an effectively functioning democracy. Dirty elections undermine confidence in the democratic system.”
A key weapon in the fight to keep elections free and fair is the National Voter Registration Act, which mandates that states make “a reasonable effort” to remove from voting rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have been disqualified from voting due to death or change of residence. States often dodge this responsibility, creating opportunities for election fraud.
Legal pressure from Judicial Watch under the NVRA has led to the removal from voter rolls of more than four million ineligible voters nationwide. JW has spearheaded major voter roll cleanups in California, New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, Colorado, and elsewhere. Cleaner voter rolls mean cleaner elections. You can learn more about JW’s voter roll cleanups here.
Judicial Watch fights on other legal fronts as well. In 2022, we defeated a highly partisan Maryland redistricting plan initiated by Democrats in the state legislature. Last year, we compelled Illinois to provide more transparency in its state-wide centralized list of registered voters. Earlier this month, we won a major victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court ruling allowing absentee ballots to be received up to five days after Election Day in Mississippi.
“Congress statutorily designated a singular ‘day for the election’ of members of Congress and the appointment of presidential electors,” the Fifth Circuit noted in its ruling. “Text, precedent, and historical practice confirm this ‘day for the election’ is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.”
Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton hailed the ruling. “This is a historic victory for election integrity and voter rights and confidence,” Tom said. “This is a precedent that ensures that only ballots that arrive by Election Day can be counted under federal law. We hope this begins a national movement to increase voter confidence, comply with federal law, and limit voter fraud by counting ballots that arrive only by Election Day.”
Mass Migration Ignites U.S. Tuberculosis Resurgence, Foreigners Account for 76% of Last Year’s Cases
The Biden-Harris border invasion is a public health crisis. Our Corruption Chronicles blog exposes the truth:
Besides compromising the safety of Americans by releasing over half a million illegal immigrants with criminal records in communities throughout the United States, the Biden administration has ignited yet another crisis by failing to properly screen migrants for contagious diseases. Judicial Watch has long reported on the serious health threat presented by illegal aliens and a decade ago exposed that tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors (Unaccompanied Alien Children—UAC) under Obama fueled a deadly respiratory virus epidemic that struck American kids across the country and killed at least nine. Months earlier a U.S. Congressman, who is also a medical doctor, had confirmed that UAC were bringing in serious diseases including swine flu, dengue fever, tuberculosis, and Ebola virus. In a letter to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Georgia lawmaker, Phil Gingrey, warned of a “severe and dangerous” crisis because the young migrants were importing infectious diseases from Central America that are considered to be largely eradicated in the U.S.
That was over a decade ago under Obama’s weak border policies and, predictably, the problem has worsened significantly during the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis that has gripped the nation under Biden and his laughable border czar, Kamala Harris. Besides the detrimental impact on national security, civilian safety, and taxpayer-funded programs (among others), mass migration is compromising health. Specifically, tuberculosis (TB), a deadly infectious disease that attacks the lungs and was once considered to be eradicated in the U.S., is on the rise. A report published by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a nonprofit dedicated to researching immigration issues, reveals that after decades of decline TB is resurfacing in the United States. “One key factor of the resurgence of TB in the U.S. is open borders and mass immigration,” FAIR researchers found. “The massive, unregulated influx of migrants from countries with higher TB rates than the United States has helped spread the disease. Even legal immigrants and refugees—who are required to undergo medical screenings before arriving in the United States—may have latent TB which then progresses to active TB and becomes transmissible once inside the United States.”
TB cases in the U.S. increased by 34% between 2020 and 2023 and the number of TB cases is now higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019, according to figures in the report. Nationally, 76% of TB cases in 2023 occurred in foreign-born patients and counties, states as well as metropolitan areas with high foreign-born populations have larger rates of TB than those with lower foreign-born populations. “Some countries of origin for both legal and illegal aliens have TB rates as high as 60 times the U.S. rate,” the FAIR report states, adding that “the government’s health screening for TB in potential immigrants is deficient” and that some categories of illegal immigrants do not undergo any type of health screening. Besides, latent TB is not grounds for inadmissibility even though some U.S. border regions have “TB rates exceeding rates in high-risk countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon,” researchers found. It is important to note that the cost of treating each case of TB is more than $20,000 and can reach over $500,000 if it is drug-resistant, FAIR points out.
“Data clearly indicate that the prevalence of tuberculosis is, in part, a function of immigration,” FAIR researchers write. “Medical experts have long acknowledged this connection.” For example, in 1990 the CDC wrote that many TB cases in the U.S. occur among foreign-born people with asymptomatic infection when they entered the United States. More recently, research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) determined that for countries with low TB rates, “immigration is an important factor in TB epidemiology, where migrants may originate from countries with substantially higher TB burden.” Incredibly, screening procedures for illegal immigrants entering the U.S. do not adequately guard against the spread of TB even though federal law states that aliens with communicable diseases “of public significance” are inadmissible. “However, the vast majority of aliens granted visas or who otherwise enter the U.S. are never medically screened,” FAIR researchers found. “Even for those who are medically screened, the standard for admission is lax, as it only excludes active TB and allows individuals with latent TB to enter the country, resulting in the importation of latent TB into the U.S.
Until next week,
