A Bourne Republican’s effort to quickly overturn a local election through the Massachusetts court system was largely shot down by a Boston judge, who said there was no evidence of fraud and voiding the contest would harm thousands of voters, according to court documents.
Kari MacRae filed a lawsuit and emergency motion in Suffolk County Superior Court asking Judge Debra Squires-Lee to block Gov. Maura Healey from certifying the results of the Plymouth and Barnstable Senate race after alleging town clerks failed to follow state laws around signature comparison requirements for early mail-in ballots.
But Squires-Lee denied the emergency motion in a ruling handed down Nov. 15, writing the evidence MacRae submitted consisted “almost entirely of hearsay” rather than concrete proof like affidavits from any of the town clerks or assistant town clerks in the district.
“Here, where there is no evidence of actual fraud, only observations of apparently mismatched or missing signatures on early voting ballot envelopes, MacRae is unlikely to succeed in her challenge given that it would necessarily result in the disenfranchisement of the 14,550 voters who voted in the primary election and the 110,00 voters who voted in the general election,” Squires-Lee wrote.
Squires-Lee’s decision means that Healey is set to certify the results from the Senate election — and all other local contests — in early December, a move that will confirm Dylan Fernandes, a Falmouth Democrat, as the next senator for the Plymouth and Barnstable district starting in 2025.
In the November general election, Fernandes beat Rep. Matt Muratore, a Plymouth Republican who himself bested MacRae in the Sept. 3 primary.
In the lawsuit filed weeks after the primary election and following recounts in the Senate district, MacRae alleged that town clerks did not follow state law by comparing signatures on early mail-in ballot envelopes to signatures on their corresponding applications.
MacRae relied on accounts of conversations with town clerks from herself, failed conservative gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl, John Paul McGrath, and Christopher Lyon.
Squires-Lee said the declarations contained “little more than bald statements of noncompliance.”
“Without additional context and detail related to the conversations during which the purported statements were made, I am unable to discern whether the averments accurately reflect those statements or whether they reflect an interpretation of the statements inconsistent with the speaker’s intent,” the judge wrote in a 10-page ruling.
MacRae filed her first two lawsuits in Plymouth and Barnstable County courts on Oct. 10, more than a month after the primary election, and in Suffolk County Superior Court on Nov. 1, only days before the general election.
Squires-Lee said the delay in filing the lawsuits was “unjustifiable” and undercut “her claim of irreparable harm.”
“MacRae did not bring the issues she perceived with the early voting envelopes to election officials during the recount. After the Plymouth and Barnstable courts denied her motion for de novo review without prejudice, she did not move again on a non-ex parte basis, seek reconsideration, or file an appeal,” Squires-Lee wrote. “Rather, three weeks later and one business day before the general election, she filed the instant case.”
Assistant Attorney General Anne Sterman, who represented Healey and Secretary of State William Galvin in the Boston case, had argued that blocking certification of the Senate election would have disenfranchised more than 110,000 voters on the South Shore and Cape Cod.
Granting MacRae’s emergency motion would also “greatly undermine public confidence in the election and cause widespread voter confusion,” Sterman said in court documents filed ahead of Squires-Lee’s ruling.
“Invalidating the primary and state election results for this district would require that all of these voters vote again, solely because of MacRae’s unjustified and inexcusable failure to raise the ‘irregularities’ she alleges in this case at any point before (Galvin) declared the final results and the state election was conducted,” Sterman said.
But MacRae had argued that if a review of the early mail-in ballot envelopes and their corresponding applications found more than 39 — the margin by which she lost to Muratore in the primary election — were “invalid,” the results “must be invalidated.”
MacRae, a Bourne School Committee member fired from Hanover High School after controversial social media videos surfaced in 2021, raised $13,400 as of Oct. 31 to fund her various legal challenges, mostly through a $10,000 donation from Thomas Wallace of Plymouth.
Originally Published:
