The election should have been over after the recounts on December 7, when my nine vote lead was cut to four after some very dubious shenanigans in Ipswich. We weren’t happy about that, but we were willing to accept it because the Rowley recount, held on the same day, saw no change from the election results, so we should’ve gone home with a slim four vote victory. But just as everyone was packing up to leave, Rowley election worker Trudy Reid allowed Democrats to rifle through a pile of spoiled ballots and unspoil five of them in order to help Kristen Kassner win by a single vote.
So with a hundred vote win turning into a one vote loss under these very specious circumstances we were left with hiring an attorney to represent us in court, where they would certainly see the mistakes made and at least have a trial where they would review the evidence. Or so we thought.
We ended up before Judge Thomas Dreschler for a hearing over a zoom call and right from the beginning it was shaping up to be a kind of kangaroo court. Judge Dreschler clearly had an outright hatred of my attorney, Michael Sullivan, and excoriated him for filing a complaint in his court without bringing any of the evidence. He wanted to see the contested ballots and we had to explain to him that we’re not allowed to touch them, they remain locked in a vault until a judge requests them. He then said we could have at least brought copies of the ballots to him and we had to explain that we’re not even allowed to take pics with our phones.
This judge didn’t even know the law! But he certainly knew my lawyer. Upon doing a Google search I learned that Dreschler was a friend and former law partner for former House Speaker Thomas Finneran. He unsuccessfully defended Finneran in the famous case where Finneran was found guilty of perjury in a gerrymandering scheme. The prosecuting attorney in the case was my lawyer, Michael Sullivan.
It’s beyond me how Dreschler was not forced to recuse himself from this case but I was still confident that he would look at the evidence and realize that this was a totally botched election. He demanded that the contested ballots be delivered to his court the next day but a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse. Kassner’s lawyer, Gerry McDonough, somehow convinced the judge to not open the evidence, saying it was outside the court’s jurisdiction. Lawyers from the Secretary of State’s office, the people who actually run elections, said the case was in the court’s jurisdiction, but Judge Dreschler disagreed, saying it was in the jurisdiction of the House of Representatives.
Under our state Constitution, the Speaker is tasked with creating a Special House Committee to review election discrepancies and make the final call on who gets seated in the House. He gets to choose two members from his own party while the House Minority Leader gets to choose one. Anyone familiar with Beacon Hill politics can guess how this went down.
Speaker Mariano chose obedient loyalists Michael Day (D-Stoneham) and Dan Ryan (D-Charlestown) while Brad Jones (R-North Reading) represented the minority party. They met on January 13, 2023, to hear both my case and the one for the First Middlesex race, and attorneys did most of the talking. Rep. Day was the Chair of the SHC and he asked most of the questions, the main one being whether we would accept the decision of the Committee. We all said we would.
Rep. Jones then asked the Kassner camp one very important question, which was if they would object to the Committee examining the contested ballots. McDonough seemed annoyed at the very idea and said to do so would be a “slap in the face to those registrars.” While at the Ipswich recount, he did not consider it a slap in the face of the Town Clerks, who are trained election workers, to appeal their decision in calling ballots for me, but now apparently it would be. It was clear that McDonough was scared to death of anyone looking at them, so he found a way to make sure the judges never saw them and now he wanted to make sure the Committee didn’t either.
The hearing was clearly a sham, just a dog and pony show.
Rumor has it that Mariano was pestered by the angry left wing extremists in his party to seat the two Democrats immediately, and after several months of pretending to “look into it” Democrats decided that they would continue to bury the evidence and make sure no one would ever see the contested ballots. They called for a vote before the full House on February 3 where Day, acting as the Speaker’s puppet, would tell the members that it was not up to them to “call balls and strikes” in an election, and to seat the Democrat.
In typical Beacon Hill manner, Democrats bowed to the Speaker’s orders and voted to do just that, making sure the contested ballots would never see the light of day. The only Democrat to join Republicans in opening the evidence was Russell Holmes (D-Boston), one of the few Democrats with the guts to stand up to the Speaker.
This is where we stand today, with a totally botched election where rules and laws were clearly broken, and a corrupt one party system where Democrats refuse to even investigate because it benefits their party. We never even got our day in court.
Worse yet, these glaring issues in our election system remain and it’s clear that cheating will be allowed when it’s done by the party in control of our state government. Calls and emails to the Secretary of State’s office, and to the Attorney General’s office, remain unanswered.
Every voter in Massachusetts needs to know how the democrats on Beacon Hill decided this election, not the voters.