Although it would be days before we knew that there were 71 votes cast or that there were vast problems aside from the one illegitimate proxy, it was clear that the election had been fraught with irregularities.
Deb Plowman herself admitted that in our conversation about the matter over the next few days, and she even added a few of her own!
Although I was scheduled to have stomach surgery for a dire problem in a matter of days, I had been besieged by phone calls and messages from people who were valid voting members of the Penobscot County GOP Committee who wanted to know how to fix the plethora of problems and irregularities which had occurred, and I pursued a conversation with Deb Plowman, hoping to get an agreement that a solution be reached.
As the facts of the illegitimate election mounted, it became clear that the only course of action would be to hold another election with only legal voting members -- as established by the bylaws of the County Committee -- allowed to vote.
Here is a screenshot of that conversation, which went on over the span of a few days.
After it became clear that former State Representative Deb Plowman was not interested in righting the wrong, I sent a message to State Chair Rich Cebra on January 29 to try to get him to step in before the appeal was filed and before it all went public.
He actually called me from Grapevine, Texas that afternoon, but when I told him what was going on, he literally started yelling about how anyone who would file an appeal was not a "good Republican," and that only someone who had "an agenda to ruin the party" would do such a thing.
Then he told me that this was going to cost the Party money for a lawyer, and when I questioned why a lawyer would be involved, he raised his voice again, saying, "Just leave me out of this mess!"
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