Grok readers should already be familiar with Nashua’s own private citizen, Laurie Ortolano, who has made many watchdog contributions over the years and has a court date next week, but there’s another pro se litigant, Paula Johnson, who also had a court date.
As an elected official in multiple capacities over the years (state rep, alderman, and school board member), she might have more name recognition, but her case might not. I’ve been asked by management to say a little something about Paula’s litigation, which has potential ties to Daniel Richard‘s current Supreme Court case. More on that later.
In preparing what to say, I thought a good idea would be to reread Paula’s petition, which is the document presented to the court outlining the complaint. There are four counts to her civil complaint, and they come from a November 18 school recount. I will pause here for a moment to include a link to a montage of 8 hours of multiple camera footage assembled with the same artistic license that NESN would use for the playoffs.
And another link, which is the aggregate (non ward specific) recount numbers.
To give a condensed synopsis, there were eight candidates running for five seats. Paula Johnson was the winner with the least number of votes and the only incumbent not affiliated with the local Ruling Class. Shewanda Daniels Williams (“SDW”), coming in only six votes behind Paula on election night, was the loser with the biggest number of votes. The recount, requested by SDW, flipped the seat to a 7-vote loss for Paula. So, 13 “Emergency Democrat Votes” were found to create the recount results. Interestingly, lots of numbers changed in varying degrees for all the candidates, but that’s a topic for another article. My assignment was to write about Paula’s case.
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Complaint #1 has to do with substantive and procedural due process. The school board is a separate and autonomous political subdivision from the City of Nashua. Article 74 of the city charter says, “the City of Nashua shall continue to constitute one school district and the school under the Nashua Charter, committee of said city, shall be ‘styled’ the Board of Education.” City Clerk Healey, a named defendant, ignored a separate statute governing school recounts, which required recount oversight by the school board rather than the Board of Aldermen. Also, a checklist was not provided to the plaintiff. School Clerk Lamphier, another named defendant, was not present for the recount as required of her.
Complaint #2 has to do with ballot storage and chain of custody. I will pause again here for a moment to share a video of Attorney Bolton, corporation counsel, lashing out at the plaintiff.
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The video is almost 6 minutes long, but the last 2 minutes are of most interest. Paula is seen asserting herself to her right to inspect things and Attorney Bolton has a meltdown. Let’s just say that there were similar procedural shenanigans to what Mr Bean(of the seacoast, not the UK) complained to SoS Scanlan about during Lou Gargiulo’s senate recount last year.(boxes taped differently and labeled differently)
Complaint #3 has to do with the Equal Protection Clause. City elections are supposed to be nonpartisan, and the plaintiff and her supporters were denied the opportunity for adequate cross-checking and observation during the recount process. There were numerous violations of this. They included but were not limited to, assigning the counting and recording to members of the Ruling Class and their minions.
I cited several examples of this in a long email to Senator Gray, the Election Law Committee chair, requesting a bill that moves city recounts to the archives.* Sadly, he seemed significantly less interested in submitting a late senate bill to clean up election operations than the House Criminal Justice Committee chair was when it came to gun background checks exploiting two recent tragedies. Disappointing. However, being the engineer that he is, he did inquire about the data regarding the change in numbers for each candidate and wanted to see the ward-specific numbers, which seemingly nobody has been able to get their hands on!
Complaint #4 has to do with the handling of absentee ballots. Remember my reference to the Daniel Richard case in the beginning? This complaint has his oral argument talking points of adjudication, verification, and processing of absentee ballots. Anyone seeking further details can refer to his case.
There’s plenty of opportunity for semi-related sidebar articles, follow-up articles, and other editorials. Paula’s court date was to be Monday, December 18, the same day as Laurie Ortolano’s case against the City. When Paula received that date over two weeks ago, Laurie’s had already been on the calendar for quite some time. Furthermore, Judge Temple has allotted Laurie 3 days for her case. One does not need a law degree to have noticed the dates overlap immediately, but Attorney Bolton waited until just a few days ago to file a Motion to Continue. That’s a request to reschedule in non-legalspeak. Naturally, Judge Temple granted Attorney Bolton’s request, as he usually does, and a new date has not yet been chosen. Stay tuned, especially because swearing-in day is coming up soon, and Paula’s plan included a “motion to expedite” as the matter is time-sensitive.
And if you have already booked a vacation day or scheduled a sitter or whatever personal arrangement to make yourself available to attend, all is not lost. Laurie Ortolano could use some support by way of filling the bleachers. A summary of her case can be found here.
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