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JACKSON — The Mississippi Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Oct. 2 as a candidate tries to revive a lawsuit that challenged his Republican primary loss to six-term Sen. Thad Cochran. The high court has released a schedule for the appeal by state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Justices said they will handle the case quickly, as McDaniel requested. Justices gave McDaniel’s attorneys until Friday to file legal arguments in his appeal. They gave Cochran’s attorneys a Sept. 24 deadline to file arguments. The McDaniel camp must file a response to Cochran’s arguments by Sept. 26. Judge Hollis McGehee dismissed McDaniel’s lawsuit...

JACKSON, Miss. — Special Judge Hollis McGehee has dismissed an election challenge filed by Chris McDaniel according to WDAM-TV. The decision ends a battle between the two since McDaniel’s June special election loss. Cochran’s attorneys asserted McDaniel should have filed his challenge within 20 days but waited until August 4. McDaniel alleged voter fraud in the election.

A tea party-backed candidate asked a Mississippi court on Thursday to declare him the winner of the June 24 Republican runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran or order a new election. Certified results of the June 24 runoff show Cochran defeated McDaniel by 7,667 votes. But McDaniel says his campaign found thousands of irregularities, including about 3,500 people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary and June 24 runoff. Mississippi voters don't register by party, but such crossover voting is prohibited.

Mississippi pastor Stevie Fielder says he was paid by Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel's (R) campaign to give an interview to a conservative blogger in which he said Sen. Thad Cochran's (R-Miss.) campaign had asked him to pay people to vote for Cochran. Fielder told conservative blogger Charles Johnson that he had been asked by a Cochran staffer to pay African-American Democrats $15 to vote for Cochran in his hard-fought primary. He's now under investigation. Johnson has said he paid Fielder $2,000 for the interview and related texts and emails, and is now reportedly facing a subpoena from the state...

In the wake of the June 24 primary runoff election in Mississippi, state Sen. Chris McDaniel's staff found the numbers in Lafayette County – home of the cabin which incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran has sometimes listed as his primary address – just didn't add up. “We decided to check the machine tapes that were printed out of every machine at 7 p.m. when the polls closed,” said Stephen Furney, a McDaniel campaign volunteer who helped in the election review process and signed an affidavit documenting what he saw in Lafayette County. “The Lafayette County circuit clerk gave us a total...

JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi’s state Republican Party on Wednesday refused to hear challenger Chris McDaniel’s effort to overturn his June 24 GOP runoff loss to U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. The party says McDaniel would do better taking his challenge to court. In a letter to McDaniel’s lawyer, state Republican Party Chairman Joe Nosef wrote that a court is needed to “protect the rights of the voters as well as both candidates.” Nosef wrote that under state Republican Party bylaws, seven days’ notice has to be given before the executive committee can meet. If the notice went out Wednesday, he wrote,...

Chris McDaniel on Monday officially contested results showing he lost a Republican primary to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, revealing what his camp alleges is evidence of voter fraud and other irregularities. "They asked us to put up or shut up. Here we are. Here we are with the evidence," McDaniel said at a news conference in Jackson. McDaniel, a state senator, has refused to concede the June 24 runoff result and filed a formal challenge with the Mississippi Republican Party's executive committee. The case could eventually wind up in court. The challenge outlined claims of more than 15,000 cases of...

Six weeks after the primary runoff election, Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel is launching his formal legal challenge of the election results, saying the evidence is so conclusive that he will be calling for courts to recognize him as the true victor of the race rather than calling for a new election. “Chris McDaniel clearly, clearly won the Republican vote in the runoff,” McDaniel attorney Mitch Tyner said at a Monday press conference. “I say that very assuredly because that’s what the mathematics show. It’s not what I’m arguing. After the election, we did some post-election polling. We determined that...

Tea Party hopeful Chris McDaniel lost his Republican primary challenge to six-term Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi on June 24. Cochran beat him by about 7,700 votes. On July 7, the state's Republican Party certified Cochran's victory. Six weeks after the run-off election, McDaniel is having a tough time moving on. On Monday, McDaniel, a state senator, announced he was formally challenging the results and asking the Mississippi Republican executive committee to declare him the party's nominee in the November general election. "Justice has no timetable, and yet here we stand," McDaniel, 42, told reporters assembled at a press conference...

The tea party-backed lawmaker defeated by U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi's Republican primary said Monday that he has formally challenged the election's outcome with the state GOP. State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed the challenge with the Mississippi GOP state executive committee over Cochran's June 24 runoff victory, McDaniel attorney Mitch Tyner said during a news conference. McDaniel will have to prove there were enough illegally cast votes to change the outcome or that the election was so sloppily handled its result is in doubt. Mississippi voters don't register by party, but state law makes so-called crossover voting — casting...

Former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) says Mississippi Republicans may need a regime change after the damaging primary fight between Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and state Sen. Chris McDaniel. “This has shown the fissures that are there and I do think the party leaders – it may cause the need for some change in the party leadership,” Lott, now the co-chairman of Squire Patton Boggs' public policy practice, told The Hill during a wide-ranging interview at the firm's Washington office. He warned that the Mississippi establishment is ignoring the Tea Party wing of the GOP at their own peril. “If they...

Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) said Friday that he will announce a "major development" on Monday related to the results of the June 24 GOP runoff election he lost to U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. McDaniel said in a news release that he will hold a press conference at his attorney's office Monday afternoon. He did not specify what he will say. But it may be an announcement that he is officially challenging the results of the election, as his legal team has said it expects to do. Cochran was certified by the Republican Party of Mississippi in July as...

RNC Rules: No. 11(B) – Candidate Support According to the public letter from leading conservatives to RNC Chair Reince Priebus, the nefarious tactics of the Barbour/Cochran machine against Chris McDaniel is likely in violation of the RNC’s own rules, adopted in 2012, specifically rule 11(B). In their letter they wrote that the rule “makes clear the Committee’s belief that Republican nomination contests should be decided by the votes of Republicans – and which goes so far as to declare that the Republican National Committee shall not recognize as the nominee of the Republican Party any nominee whose nomination results from...

The Republican National Committee will take up the explosive subject of the race-card playing radio ads in the Mississippi Senate GOP run-off election between Senator Thad Cochran and Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniel. The RNC is scheduled to hold its summer meeting in Chicago August 6-9 at the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The discussion, according to an RNC source, will occur on the morning of August 7 — behind closed doors — at the “Members Only” breakfast that runs between 8:00-9:30. There is no word whether RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, under pressure to investigate the ads, will then comment...

Listen to an audio version of this column In her Wednesday column, "Eyes on the Prize," Ann Coulter again weighs in on the Republican primary run-off here in Mississippi, and again, her assertions about Chris McDaniel and his supporters are wrong. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at what she says. After all, she has been a big supporter of Mitt Romney, Chris Christie and Mitch McConnell, none of whom would easily be mistaken for a "conservative." It seems all that matters to Ann Coulter is that an "R," not a "D," is the winner, no matter how liberal the...

While incumbent Thad Cochran will be the likely candidate to face Democrat and former Rep. Travis Childers this fall, state senator and Mississippi Republican U.S. Senate primary candidate Chris McDaniel is not throwing in the towel – and checking for voting irregularities across the state. McDaniel’s ultimate goal is to get a new election by showing that people who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary also voted in the June 24 Republican runoff. “This affects every voter in Mississippi,” said Mitchell Tyner, a member of McDaniel’s legal team, at a July 16 press conference from his Jackson office. “The...

JACKSON, Miss. —A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments Thursday in a lawsuit filed by a group seeking Mississippi voter records. U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas of Texas will be in Jackson to hear arguments by True the Vote organization. The lawsuit seeks access to nine counties' voter rolls as Chris McDaniel gathers information to challenge his Republican primary runoff loss to Sen. Thad Cochran. Plaintiffs say federal law requires authorities to release of voting rolls and poll books without erasing voters' personal information.

On July 7th, the Mississippi GOP Executive Committee certified the results of the June 24th primary run-off, declaring Thad Cochran the winner. Senator McDaniel has not accepted this result, and has refused to concede the election. McDaniel volunteers have been scouring ballot boxes and poll books across Mississippi’s 82 counties .. when they have been allowed access. Approximately two dozen county clerks still refuse to allow the McDaniel camp to examine the records. McDaniel representatives are expressing confidence that they have a case to make, believing they can cast overwhelming doubt on the 7,600 vote margin of victory that the...

The Republican National Committee should censure the committeeman from Mississippi, Henry Barbour, and perhaps request (although not demand) his resignation from the RNC. Barbour’s apparent involvement with nakedly race-baiting ads and robocalls during the GOP senatorial primary runoff in his state, and his prevarications afterwards both in public and in e-mails to other committee members, merit an official public shaming. To be clear about exactly what in Barbour’s conduct does and doesn’t deserve a rebuke, and to take care of some housekeeping with regard to journalistic ethics, please forgive a bit of personal backstory.

Hillary Clinton thanked the Republican establishment and its big business allies for taking on the Tea Party and defeating conservative candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi's June runoff. In a Thursday interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Clinton said tea partiers and conservatives needed to be reined in. And she said it was about time the GOP establishment got a "wake-up call from the big business wing" that wants to continue the bipartisan big government policies that have made Washington, D.C.'s suburbs the country's wealthiest "boomtown." "Finally, the Republican establishment and their business supporters have woken up," Clinton said, noting...