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A few days ago on the 11th August, DefinitelyJoey petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a request for a Judicial Review of theirs. The petition sought an immediate injunction from the Supreme Court suspending the certification of the 148th Presidential Election’s results until a thorough investigation into potential election fraud had been made.
The aforementioned election was one of the closest ones in SimDemocracy history, with Notcom only being named President after a tiebreaker. Thus it won’t come as a surprise that public attention was quickly swayed towards the Department of Voter Registration (DoVR) having found four potentially suspicious ballots during the checking process. The DoVR recommended the removal of these votes to the Electoral Commission, but whether an actual removal of votes occurred is not within public knowledge. Thus, the election results might have been different depending on what happened behind the scenes, which is the reason DefinitelyJoey cited for their request.
The topic of whether President Notcom had engaged in election fraud to win the 148th Presidential Election has been hotly debated by SimDemocracy politicians and the general public since the day she entered office, with some citing her obviously unpopular policy and previous underperforming in election polls as potential “proofs” of there having occurred some form of election tampering. A poll by Oaxis Strategies indicates that 69% of active users are explicitly dissatisfied with Notcom’s election victory.
Another poll by the same polling company whose results were published on the 12th of August indicates that 67% of active users believe the election results should be “investigated or formally challenged”. Of course (both of) these poll results cannot be taken as absolute truth, as the polling company is owned by DefinitelyJoey themselves, the person who also submitted the petition to the Supreme Court.
Despite the obvious public interest in the topic, or perhaps exactly because of it, the Supreme Court has, through its Chief Justice Sparty, decided to neither hear the case nor grant an injunction suspending the election results. This was announced one day after the petition had been submitted (i.e. on the 12th August). Whether this decision is due to Chief of Staff Moved’s Amicus Brief, which urged the court to not hear the Judicial Review, because of it believing the petition to be unnecessary, or because of the court possessing more information about the case than the general public is unclear as the Chief Justice has added no reasoning to his announcement.