A federal judge on Monday dismissed the "Kraken" election fraud lawsuit filed in Georgia by attorney Sidney Powell, who sought to decertify the Georgia presidential election results declaring former Vice President Joe Biden the winner.
Judge Timothy Batten of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia listened to arguments for a little more than an hour before ruling from the bench to grant a motion to dismiss from lawyers for the state of Georgia, WSB-TV reported. He said that this sort of case belongs in state court, not federal court, that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that Powell waited too long to file her complaint about Dominion Voting Systems machines.
"The courts have convincingly held that these types of cases are not properly before federal courts. These are state elections. State courts should evaluate these proceedings from start to finish," Batten said.
"Moreover, the plaintiffs simply do not having standing to bring these claims," he added.
"Additionally, I find that the plaintiffs waited too long to file this suit," Batten said. "Their primary complaint involves the Dominion ballot marking devices. They say those machines are susceptible to fraud. There is no reason they could not have followed the administrative procedure act to the rule-making authority that had been exercised by the Secretary of State."
"This suit could have been filed months ago at the time these machines were adopted," Batten concluded. "Instead the plaintiffs waited until over three weeks after the election to file the suit. There's no question in my mind that if I were to deny the motion to dismiss, the matter would be brought before the 11th Circuit, and the 11th Circuit would reverse me."
Powell in recent weeks claimed that her "massive" lawsuit would "save" the Trump presidency by uncovering evidence of a widespread conspiracy to commit election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She alleged, among several other claims, that international and domestic persons used Dominion Voting Systems, the company that manufactures the voting machines in Georgia, to fix the election by switching votes for Trump to Biden.
In arguing to have the case dismissed, the defendants pointed out that Georgia has certified its election results three times: Once after the first count, a second time in a hand-counted audit of the 5 million ballots cast, and a third recount that confirmed the results from the previous two.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he will recertify the state election results, confirming that Joe Biden won Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes.
"Today the Secretary of State's office will be re-certifying our state's election results," Raffensperger said. "Then the safe harbor under the United States Code to name electors is tomorrow, and then they will meet on December 14th to officially elect the next president."
Additionally, a federal judge in Michigan denied an emergency request filed by Powell to overturn the election in that state, making similar arguments about the timing of Powell's lawsuit and the complaint being moot and adding that the court lacks the power to overturn an election.
"Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters," U.S. District Judge Linda Parker wrote in her 36-page opinion. "This, the Court cannot, and will not, do."
Parker also said that "the ship has sailed" on this case and that the lawsuit was filed too late.
"Plaintiffs could have lodged their constitutional challenges much sooner than they did, and certainly not three weeks after Election Day and one week after certification of almost three million votes," Parker wrote.
She also criticized the allegations of fraud made in Powell's affidavits as "an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation that such alterations were possible" (emphasis hers).
"With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, plaintiffs' equal protection claim fails," her opinion stated.
On Nov. 22 before this lawsuit was filed, President Trump's legal team distanced itself from Powell in a statement making clear that she "is practicing law on her own" and "is not a member of the Trump legal team," despite the fact that she appeared with Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a press conference just days earlier.