McCutcheon has filed a complaint with the Mississippi secretary of state. McCutcheon wades into Miss. race

The plaintiff in a landmark campaign finance case is asking Mississippi to investigate allegations of election fraud in that state’s Republican primary between Sen. Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel.

Shaun McCutcheon — an Alabama GOP donor, tea party activist and the victorious original plaintiff in the 2014 Supreme Court case that bears his name — has filed a complaint with the Mississippi secretary of state arguing that Democratic crossover voters in the June primary are guilty of a misdemeanor under state law.


“It appears thousands of people who apparently voted in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on June 3, 2014, were permitted to vote in the Republican runoff for U.S. Senate on June 24, 2014,” the complaint alleges.

McCutcheon and his hybrid PAC Conservative Action Fund have asked the Mississippi secretary of state to refuse to recognize the results of the June runoff election, investigate allegations of voter fraud and take steps in the future to enforce state laws.

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“Allowing the current runoff results to stand would flout state law and violate the constitutional right to vote of those who complied” with state law, the complaint alleges.

Mississippi law doesn’t allow someone to vote in a party’s runoff race if that same person voted in the other party’s original primary. So Democrats could vote in the June 24 GOP runoff only if they hadn’t voted in the June 3 Democratic primary.

State election law further bans voting in a party primary if the voter doesn’t intend to support that party’s nominee in the general election — though courts have ruled that second provision unenforceable.

Tea party activists and grass-roots conservative forces have been loudly complaining about Cochran’s close runoff victory over McDaniel. Cochran’s team pulled off that win in part by appealing to the state’s black voters — many of whom are registered Democrats.

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McDaniel’s campaign has vowed to contest the election results. It announced last week that it had identified 8,300 ballots that it deemed suspicious — alleging that many of those voters were ineligible to vote in the GOP primary.

“For the last two weeks, more than two hundred volunteers [from] all over Mississippi have worked tirelessly in an effort to gain access to election records in order to ensure the integrity of the primary process in Mississippi,” McDaniel said in a statement Friday. “We have found over 8,300 questionable ballots cast, many of which were unquestionably cast by voters ineligible to participate in the June 24th runoff election.”

McCutcheon was at the center of a lawsuit earlier this year that struck down the federal aggregate contribution limit — the rule capping the total amount of money that a donor could give to all federal candidates.

Since the decision, he has stayed in the spotlight as a Republican donor and public advocate on campaign finance and election law issues.