A Michigan IT contract worker who gained notoriety for her fiery election fraud testimony alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani — including being lampooned as a “Valley girl” on Saturday Night Live — is launching a political career.
Mellissa Carone announced her campaign for the state House of Representatives in Michigan’s 46th District.
One of Ms. Carone’s top campaign issues is election reform, building upon her claims of election irregularities she witnessed while working at the TCF Center in Detroit in November.
“We need to completely take out the mail-in ballots. We can’t have that anymore,” Ms. Carone told The Washington Times. “We would go back to voting in person and hand counts of the ballots.”
During former President Trump’s prolonged challenge of the November election results, Ms. Carone signed an affidavit and told state lawmakers that she witnessed irregularities during the ballots count.
She said poll workers scanned ballots multiple times and that workers from Dominion Voting Systems acted suspiciously.
“They were cheating. It was very, very apparent,” Ms. Carone said at a December hearing alongside Mr. Giuliani, who led the Trump campaign’s legal team disputing the election.
Dominion has since filed defamation lawsuits against Mr. Giuliani and another pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for claims of election misconduct.
The company also sent Ms. Carone a cease-and-desist letter, demanding she stop spreading false information about the company. The company has also noted she was hired to clean the voting machines for one day.
She said she will not be silenced.
“They can try to silence or shut us down, but this is still America. We all have our First Amendment right to speak freely and I will be doing that,” Ms. Carone said. “Nobody is going to silence me. I am not scared of them.”
Her heated testimony where she repeatedly interrupted and turned the questions back on lawmakers went viral, with late-night television hosts suggesting she was intoxicated and SNL performing a skit based on the exchange.
Ms. Carone, a 34-year-old mother, has denied she was under the influence during the testimony.
“It was negative and they did it for all the wrong reasons, but it came together in the right way to put me in a situation where I can take a leadership position and I can go in and have some really good policies that Michigan and every state needs,” she said.
Ms. Carone noted that left-leaning news outlets published articles about her past legal charge for disorderly conduct during a family dispute with her fiance’s ex-girlfriend.
“We all have stuff in our backgrounds,” she said. “Why don’t they look into Joe Biden’s and his family?”
Ms. Carone’s Facebook page reveals she is a strong supporter of life and the Second Amendment. It notes she’s set up a website VoteCarone.com for fundraising.
”We really need some strong-minded conservative people to start taking some leadership positions in order for us to maintain our freedom because we are losing it at a fast rate and people don’t see it,” she said.
She’s running for a seat currently held by John Reilly, a Republican who can’t run for re-election in 2022 because of term limits.
The district is in safe Republican territory north of Detroit. A Democrat has not represented the area since 1992.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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