Former gubernatorial candidate Culp files lawsuit against WA Sec of State
Dec 11, 2020, 7:34 AM | Updated: 7:41 am
Loren Culp at an election event. (Culp for Governor, Facebook)
(Culp for Governor, Facebook)
On Thursday, the “Culp for Governor” campaign filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court against the Washington Secretary of State asking for injunctive relief and demand for an audit of the paper ballots, vote counting machines, and voting results in King, Clark, Thurston, Pierce, Kitsap, and Skagit counties.
In the weeks following the November election, gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp has been insistent about his refusal to concede to incumbent Gov. Jay Inslee, adding that his campaign would take legal action over allegations of voter fraud.
With Washington election certified, Loren Culp continues to threaten legal action
Christopher Gergen, Culp’s senior campaign advisor, teased at that legal action in mid-November, saying at the time that he had “a lot of evidence of people receiving ballots who are not citizens,” as well as “evidence that dead people voted.” Gergen had also claimed the campaign had that evidence in hand, but continued to stop short of producing it publicly.
That’s a strategy Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman has found challenging, given her central role in helping investigate any potential claims of voter fraud.
“That’s what’s been a little frustrating by all these allegations on social media over the past month — give me something tangible,” she told KTTH’s Jason Rantz Show. “Give me a name of a person with an affidavit that’s signed and said that they received a ballot that shouldn’t have. Give me a name of a person that’s deceased who had a ballot returned.”
“Without the data, it’s impossible to do an investigation,” she added.
Gergan and Culp’s attorney Dr. Stephen Pidgeon spoke about the newly filed lawsuit in a YouTube video posted to the Culp for Governor campaign page on Dec. 10.
Culp files suit against Secretary of State today. 🇺🇸👇 https://t.co/uATS8nG4ls
— Loren Culp, Candidate for Governor of WA State (R) (@LorenCulp) December 11, 2020
“We saw a lot of problems here in this particular election. And our review of this election is starting to surface things that are just, quite frankly, unacceptable,” Pidgeon said.
“If you get overconfident, you tend to get sloppy, and that’s exactly what happened,” he added.
The state constitution calls on the Secretary of State to make sure that the election is run fairly, Pidgeon explained. The state also has an obligation to determine who can vote and who cannot, he said.
“We know that the state did not run the failed ID act software against their own database prior to the election, so people were getting duplicate ballots, lots of them,” he said. “We know that they didn’t run a NCOA, a new change of address, against the postal records. In fact, they haven’t done that in four years, so they had 336,000 names on their mailing list that were people who had moved, many of which were undeliverable, but 171,000 of which had moved out of state.”
“The one that really tops it off, is of course the voting dead, which we see clear evidence of this,” Pidgeon said. “They put out ballots to over 10,000 dead people, and 7,800 of them voted.”
The state’s 2020 election results were officially certified by Wyman on Dec. 1, 2020.
Wyman has not yet publicly responded to Culp’s lawsuit.
This is a developing story.
