[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor... - "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
Dominion at the very least should be demanding they remove the word “news” from all their branding if this is to fly.
It’s the equivalent of /r/politics for boomers. A bunch of people getting riled up together about the “obvious stupidity” of “the other side”.
We can discuss the issue with a news network that argues in court "It's not news, it's just their opinion" while presenting it as news, without going 12 year old in it.
It's much like how a valid critique of Ballmer era Microsoft is immediately undermined by referring to them as Micro$oft or Microsucks etc.
So lawyer is a licensed profession but doesn't really indicate any knowledge regarding cybersecurity, and cybersecurity advisor might indicate some knowledge, though not really, as it's not a licensed profession.
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-i...
Discovery is a two-way street, and if “any good lawyer can make a case for whatever they want” with it, that gives Rudy as much motive to avoid discovery as Dominion.
In reality, facts matter, and even the best lawyer needs something to make a case out of (and even an unimpressive lawyer can make a case out of a smoking gun).
Discovery on Rudy's side is likely to be boring or need a lot of generous reading to draw a conclusion of defamation.
Discovery on Dominion's side can get interesting. For example, can they prove that some part of the source code did indeed come from that Venezuelan company? If so, what does this mean? Can discovery prove connections between current or former officers and the Venezuelan company? What does that mean? How much of their claims do they need to prove to show that the statements have some basis in fact?
Turns out one of the heads of Dominion was affiliated with Antifa (whatever that means, I don't know.) Could they find that he accessed systems during the night of the election outside of his duties? I dunno.
I think it also turns out that a former Dominion officer went to work for Soros after the election. What does that mean? I dunno.
So I personally think there is a lot more interesting things to be found on the Dominion side.
If there was anything shady going on, they would have to be fucking morons to run it through the company. So chances are, they probably won't find anything.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/...
From the article:
"The former acting director of the EAC’s Voting System Testing and Certification Program, Ryan Macias, said the report showed “a grave misunderstanding” of the voting system used in Antrim County as well as “a lack of knowledge of election technology and process.” The report, as a result, “has come to a preposterous conclusion,” Macias said."
- Former Trump official (irrelevant)
- Could not find anything in the article to support corruption. I agree with this, since charging corruption is very strong.
- 68% error rates are not really errors. OK
- Does not look like anyone actually went in there and set a zero. The specific picture is blacked out, so I cannot tell what was happening (I seem to remember an earlier version where it wasn't blacked out, but probably just human memory playing tricks.)
Fortunately for you (aha!) I actually was not looking at these things. What I found interesting were the following:
- Instances of verifiable high rates of adjudication not just here, but elsewhere. There is a clip of an official in some county where they said their adjudication rate was 60% which is excessive and means x% of votes were decided by people in a room somewhere.
- Deleted log files for 2020 but not 2016 (this was the big one for me, should be unacceptable.)
- Same ballots giving different results. Admittedly, this could be user error.
It's for this reason I wish the Supreme court had taken up the case.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/482569-senate-gop-blocks-...
In general this statement makes sense, but for election-related systems you'd rather want a way to prove the systems are actually reliable and not hackable, and not wait for something wrong to happen in the first place.
That's precisely why most democracies actually still use and only allow paper ballots.
At which point the voting machine's role really doesn't matter because the fact is the people making these claims don't trust the paper ballot count either.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/514813-georgia-accu...
I'd say when people start storming the US Capitol, it's time to stop ignoring the underlying issue. Why are you so afraid of confirming the facts via evidence? I think the clear answer is that you're afraid it might not be what you want to hear.
As another person replied, the evidence for "voter liberation" has been evaluated in the court and found lacking.
PS: Which is another sad thing.. that the claims are fraud are really that they allowed more legal voters to vote. Such a pitiful state of democracy.
Giuliani was jockeying for time trying to dig up more hard evidence. He apparently wasn't able to find enough in time, and judges didn't want to get involved for political reasons.
https://depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michi...
Next, we know the state's mouthpiece will try to refute that handily, so we take a look at such an article, from Michigan itself:
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/14/m...
In particular, pay attention to the confounding of two separate issues to discredit the above forensic report:
> The group previously claimed there were six precincts with more than 120% turnout in the state's election. But its data was incorrect, according to publicly available turnout numbers.
"The group" did not make such claims or at least I could not find any, it was the affiant who did and he is management at the company. I could not actually find the source material on this so I am trusting the article.
Anyway, what is important is what was NOT refuted in the article.
Because, quite possibly, there is where efforts should be focused. These pieces of presumably factual evidence should be refuted by an adversarial party but are not and are just left to be memory holed.
I have not yet found anything specifically refuting the forensics report above. Simply news articles confounding things in what appears to be an effort to discredit findings. Not that I've looked too hard, mind you.
So I'm still wondering... why are 2020 logs missing while 2016 logs remain? Why do the machines give different numbers for the same votes?
These are important questions. Do not think we'll get an answer though.
And for the record, I always found Bush's Diebold election fishy.
>The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.
The first one sounds like they're looking at warning logs the program outputs. Those could be startup logs completely unrelated to ballots. The percent of your program's log lines that are warning logs cannot be in any way compared to the Federal Election Commission guidelines on how often a ballot can be miscounted.
It's like the telephone scammers that try to dupe old people into giving them access to their PC by convincing them that they have a virus. Their proof? Get the trusting boomer to open the Windows Event Viewer, which on pretty much anybody's PC is replete with trivial warnings and errors. Then pretend that means something is terribly, terribly wrong.
The idea that the proof is too well hidden is itself un-falsifiable, as any amount of effort to find proof, if it doesn't exist, can simply be dismissed as "well it's just too well hidden".
If you are starting from an assumption of guilt, then sure: any lack of evidence will always appear to be evidence that is well hidden. If you assume guilt then it is practically axiomatic that lack of evidence really means it's well hidden.
Storming the Capitol does not change the burden of proof. The underlying issues have also been addressed in a few dozen failed court cases. By all means examine the evidence, but actually have some: saying you can't because it's too well hidden is not a rational approach.
If a third-world country controlled by rebels ran a "free and fair" election, where they "counted" the presidential ballots behind closed doors and eventually determined that the rebel dictator won the election....then by your logic, it would be absurd and unfair of the citizens to question those election results.
Also, here's some evidence you can look into that should have been enough to trigger more formal investigations: https://depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michi...
We have also already had a public process. President Trump exercised all avenues to prove himself the winner, deprived via fraud. They went through public courts and public scrutiny. His own prior commission on voter fraud disbanded without significant findings of similar levels of fraud he alleged occured during 2016.
What public process would you propose when private investigators, the courts, and an administration eager to prove its claims of fraud did not find anything worthwhile? When the head of the department of justice and a strong Trump supporter said claims of fraud on any relevant scale were BS?
At some point the demand for a "public process" begins looking like paranoia, when every failure to find anything significant is used to bolster the claim "that just means it's really well hidden".
When you're using the lack of evidence as justification for your claim, no public process will ever satisfy you if it doesn't confirm your assumption.
The bar set by the "stop the steal" crowd was that unless you uncovered that Donald Trump really won the election, you didn't investigate hard enough.
Sure, that version of events requires way more people in on the scam and would leave behind way more evidence, which hasn't turned up, but I can't prove it didn't happen so it's still totally worth investigating further.
GBI hand checked a random sample of 15K ballots in Cobb county for signature mismatch issues and found no fraudulent ballots, but that apparently doesn't count for anything, because they didn't look at Fulton county which is now where we're saying the fraud was. Cobb county still probably cheated the election since Biden won there, but they must've just forged the signatures too well.
And you like to pretend all you want is more election security and verifiability. Well gee, I'd like that too, as long as it doesn't compromise the secrecy of the ballot or the accessibility of voting to eligible voters. I think all software used in elections should be open source, for example. But there is a massive gulf between wanting better voting technology, and claiming that an election WAS stolen. The latter requires serious evidence. We do have some ways of verifying the election such as checking the paper trail, and when we've done that here, fraud hasn't shown up.
You'll always claim the investigation is insufficient unless it does find fraud, and completely discount the value of anything that confirms the count was correct. Yet you'll give credence to a "forensic report" from batshit crazy Russell Ramsland (mixed up MN and MI, claimed 781% turnout, claimed fractional vote counting based on rounded percentage numbers from NYT...)
Why is it so easy to believe that hundreds of poll workers, election officials, judges, governors, secretaries of state, etc. conspired to commit or cover up fraud, and are all lying about it - but hard to believe that Trump and his allies are the ones lying? Either way somebody is lying. And there are multiple occasions where I KNOW Giuliani said something that was complete BS -- such as that the number of mail-in ballots returned in PA exceeded the number requested. So it really wouldn't shock me at all to find out more, or all, of what he said was garbage.
Are there actually claims of miscounted votes that you feel were miscounted or incorrectly treated that you feel are verifiable? (And haven’t already been refuted via evidence)
My understanding is that in several places the envelopes in which the ballots were sent were allegedly prone to irregularities and the ballots have been extracted anyway and the envelopes disposed of, so recounts would by default take in account faulty/incomplete ballots if this actually happened. (no idea if the claim is true, however)
Are envelopes generally involved? In the Antrim County dispute[1] it sounds like they use Image Cast Precinct (ICP) tabulators[2][3]. This[4] appears to be a video of one in use[5], and it doesn't seem to involve an envelope. If there's 100% mail-in voting then yes every ballot would have an envelope. But if there's any less than 100% then there will be less envelopes than ballots, so I'm not sure envelopes would be too useful for recounts.
[1] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/14/m...
[2] https://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/SOS_Benson_Response_An...
[3] https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Mi...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4l3eKRJv4
[5] https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/dominion-imagecas...
Do you have a source for that? Michigan's response in the Antrim County dispute (which I think you're referring to by "60% adjudication rate") seems to say the original hand marked ballots are retained:
>Because voting tabulators in Michigan use hand marked, paper ballots, any alleged errors in tabulators can be caught during a hand recount, which any candidate could have requested in Antrim County.
https://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/SOS_Benson_Response_An...
Hint: he won't
When someone asserts "voter fraud" they are making the accusation that a crime was committed. It is not the obligation of the accused to prove their innocence, it is the obligation of other parties to prove guilt.
So you're looking at it the wrong way. The election, with all its established safeguards, is assumed "innocent" unless accusations of guilt (fraud) are proven. No significant accusations have stood up under scrutiny. The presumption of innocence stands.
I get what the laws are and mostly why they are. I just think elections should be a system without question, regardless how ridiculous the claim is. It should be trivial to without question and verifiably prove them wrong.
Didn't make any difference at all. It's very easy to throw doubt on something when people want it to be wrong.
Why should they go out of their way? They have a process. They followed the process. They followed the process of handling challenges to the process (of which there were an inordinate number.) If that doesn't prove it, nothing more is going to.
> because now we have nearly 1/2 the country that isn’t quite sure.
The polls I’ve seen put it closer to 1/4-1/3, not “nearly 1/2”.
Heck, several counties have had to point out that they don’t use Dominion machines. If such basic facts can’t dissuade those who think this election was stolen, it’s not clear what would do it.
The real tell is if these patriots keep digging to find and expose the conspirators in the "steal", or if somehow all interest in the fraud is lost when Trump is not going to be President. If their efforts will not reverse this election, how can the patriots stop from protecting the next election from the conspiracy?
It's in everyone's best interest to make sure this doesn't ever happen. I think in the short term it (at the very least) needs to be discussed to make more people aware. You need to keep in mind that a majority of the population is blind to many of the relevant FACTS that exist, thanks to the corrupt state of our mass media. The next-steps should be to see what actions can be taken to add transparency, decentralization, and public verification for elections moving forward. And we need to begin holding ALL politicians accountable when they lie or abuse their office for political or personal gains.
We have a process for determining who won the Presidential election, with many avenues for presenting challenges. Trump fully availed himself of his challenges, and was determined to have lost.
Not only is the burden on those disputing the result, but they've had extensive opportunities and failed to meet it.
To extend your line of reasoning, if accused of a crime should you have to prove you didn’t do it? Or should the burden be on the accuser/prosecution?
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply here since it's not a specific individual being accused of a crime. This is a PUBLIC process within a constitutional republic (which means we use a public process known as an election to decide who makes decisions), and I believe the results of aforementioned PUBLIC process should be PUBLICLY verifiable. That isn't an unfair statement.
Think about it, how do you know that Biden won? Considering you cannot prove that Biden won, and I cannot prove he didn't win, I'd say we have a pretty broken process.
I think plenty of people do. Although I think a better goal would be to investigate errors and fraud and determine if the election results are accurate to a reasonable enough degree. (That is, don't go in with a foregone conclusion of who won or whether there was significant fraud or not.)
>I'm not aware of any individual claim that was debunked via substantiating evidence. They refused to answer, refused to report it in the media, and ran full speed in the opposite direction.
Here's one of the big accusations against Dominon in the Antrim County case[1]:
>We reviewed the Tabulation logs in their entirety for 11/6/2020. The election logs for Antrim County consist of 15,676 total lines or events. Of the 15,676 there were a total of 10,667 critical errors/warnings or a 68.05% error rate.
>The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.
Ryan Macias, former acting director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Voting System Testing and Certification Program said[2]
>But that “is based on a lack of understanding of the voting system,” Macias wrote.
> Macias told us in a phone interview that the “errors” described in the report are, essentially, entries of alerts from tabulation event logs — and that they don’t mean that something went wrong.
So this "68.05% error rate" I think is certainly debunked as not comparable to .0008%. You can't compare what percent of a program's log lines are warning logs to ballot errors. Also there's a math error, 1/250,000 is .0004% , not .0008% .
[1] https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Mi...
[2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/audit-in-michigan-county-r...
There's an election process with many layers of oversight, that's the 'proof'.
Just because there are what might appear to be opaque elements to us plebes, doesn't mean there is any material lack of integrity.
Most tellingly: Giuliani himself did not argue fraud in court - because he could be disbarred for introducing garbage in that process.
If the Giuliani/Trump case had any material merit whatsoever (they had umpteen people willing to provide them their 'evidence') obviously, they would have tried the courts 'for real' which they mostly did not.
They did go after things like State Congressional rights to alter voting days, to expand mail-in voting due to COVID, but that in and of itself doesn't really constitute fraud. Every state has mail-in procedures already in place.
Finally - anything that was really problematic would have been made public - as they did with a couple of videos in which they maligned workers essentially doing their jobs.
As far as Dominion - there is a paper trail for auditing, there have been hand-counts and the tallies match, i.e. no fraud at the ballot validation level.
Dominion is probably one of the more secure elements in the process.
The most 'grey and ambiguous' area of voting boils down to voter rolls. If you look at Georgia legal battles, you see they fight over the policies for purging the rolls. 'If so and so has not returned their mail-in card in over 2 years, they purge' etc..
In 2000, the vote was extremely close in Florida, and it may very well have come down to the degree to which certain groups were purged.
That said - this doesn't leave a lot of opportunity for systematic fraud. Someone grabbing someone else's ballot from the mailbox, forging their signature is well within likely to happen, and surely does happen, but it can't feasibly be scaled. The voter rolls themselves are monitored, it's not like they are a black box either.
It's important to remember that the initiative was populist. It was not to convince the courts or anyone of integrity that there was fraud, because we already knew the answer. The issue was entirely a campaign of public misinformation to discredit an opponent, to sow distrust in the system.
By far the worst 'crime' in all of this is someone using the legitimate authority of the Office of President of the USA to knowingly spread false information. Or at least a close second to pressuring election officials, state officials, the VP, and senators to interfere directly with the process.
And that is Dominion's strongest evidence for actual malice on the part of Giuliani.
In what world do you live in where this statement constitutes as proof.
> Just because there are what might appear to be opaque elements to us plebes, doesn't mean there is any material lack of integrity.
This is extremely naive. Politicians take shits just like you and me, power is an illusion.
I believe I've touched on most of your other points in my other replies. (may need to have HN settings set to showdead=yes to view them)
Where is the 'Proof' that he's 82 and not 87?
So you're having a difficult time accepting that for many things in life we use inference and incidental facts, we don't provide forensic evidence.
Moreover, if there was a problem with the election, it's your issue to prove, not the other way around.
If there was such widespread fraud as Trump claimed, it would be relatively easy to prove.
As for 'Politicians shits and power is an illusion' - this doesn't make any sense at all.
Politicians lie and cheat, yes of course, that's why we have oversight, recounts, process, procedure, voting machines etc..
I think what you're trying to say is that the argument about malice is easier because as an attorney of record on cases involving allegations against Dominion, he "should have been" in a better position to know the truth than a layperson repeating the same nonsense.
And likewise, it's near impossible to prove a negative.
If we followed your train of thought, we'd be demanding that Hillary Clinton prove she didn't harvest adenochrome from terrified paedophilia victims in a pizza restaurant.
Which is pretty ridiculous, right?
That part seems bizarre. Surely he ought to still be culpable is he said false things with the intention to damage Dominion, even if he can convince the court that he believed the things he said. Unless, of course, you're talking about an insanity defense or a claim of provocation, but those a very different matter, and I highly doubt that's a viable route.
The same question came up with Trump's phone calls to the Georgia AG when the President was essentially threatening the AG to 'do something'. There is apparently a lot of materiality to the notion of how much the President actually believed the issue of fraud.
Which is an altogether amazing new line of defence: "If you believe the lie thoroughly, you're literally less culpable!"
It's entirely plausible that people 'get things wrong' in the real world.
But once you have a guy who will believe everything that's to his benefit, and claim that everything not to his credit is a lie ... well then you have a problem.
It's really, really worrisome how many intelligent people do not see quite obviously the game he is playing.
It's one thing for people who watch Judge Judy every day to maybe have difficulty with a lie so forcefully presented, but most people should know better.
It's also interesting how it's viewed from outside the bubble of the US where the ration of 'believers' is vastly lower, and yet, at the same time there are even die-hard cohorts of them outside the border as well.
There was a 'Stop The Steal' min-march in Montreal Canada of all places.
You can’t kill someone because you think you are acting in self-defense. You have to actually be acting in self-defense. Moreover, pressuring officials to manufacture fake evidence, or act as if they had evidence they don’t have, surely ought to be illegal even if would have been possible to find real evidence.
That's not true at all. The bar is typically whether a reasonable person would believe that they are at risk of grave bodily harm. It obviously depends on the jury, but there have been a number of shootings where the shooter believed they were acting in self-defense, but were not, and they were ultimately acquitted.
We're talking about a different kind of crime.
The law states someone has to 'knowingly try to interfere etc' but the challenge is that you'd have to prove that Trump knew he lost.
If he truly believed he had won, well, then he'd just be trying to fix the election, not rig it, right?
The call was along the lines of how Mafia bosses talk, so that they don't implicate themselves.
Here are some details [1]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-call-g...
I think they ought to adjust the laws here. Elected officials should maybe be able to provide evidence for review, but that's it.
But surely he was knowingly try to interfere even if he had in fact won.
In any case I think it’s unlikely that Rudi will be claiming insanity.
I think the funniest part of this is that there are columns here that contain "[number] [sentence]" formats, as if the person who built it doesn't quite get the idea of a spreadsheet.
Actually the same people, or at least political faction, did. Over the idea of looking into and correcting the mistakes, of course, not over the idea of letting a potentially mismanaged election stand without further review.
Google “Brooks Brothers riot” for one example.
Agreed on adults that somehow are now missing or more concerned with their Twitter feeds than their responsibilities.
Yes. This is airtable is used on a number of websites that claim to show Biden cheated. It's a form of gish galloping - look closer at any of these, there's a reason why no court seriously entertained them. But when presented with so many items, it seems like there is something to it(of course, there's not).
This is false on several levels. One, several cases went through trial to a verdict. Second, of those that did not, several were thrown out on grounds that while perhaps “procedural”, include as part of their standards review of the actual and proferred evidence in the light most favorable to the party to be ruled against.
For instance, where cases were dismissed for “failure to state a claim”, this was not usually a finding that the Trump (or allied) party failed to enumerate the legal elements of an offense, but that they failed at the step beyond that which is required, to enumerate specific more detailed facts that actually would satisfy each of those elements, and proffer evidence which would make a prima facie case for each required point. (That is, which would suffice to prove the case in the absence of any counterevidence from the other side.) When cases are, as many of the Trump & allied cases were, thrown out for this reason, the court is making a finding on the merits: it is finding that the party being ruled against would lose on the merits if the case went to trial, all the evidence the moving party has offered were accepted at face value, and the other party just chose not to present anything at all to counter it.
(Now, its true that in many cases the same lawsuits dismissed on this grounds were also dismissed on a other grounds – standing and laches, particularly – but it is misleading to say that the merits of the claims and the value of the evidence the plaintiff’s had was not considered.)
That's not the way lawyers use the term "on the merits". See, e.g., [0].
> The distinction between decisions that rest on the merits rather than on procedural grounds is important because a decision on the merits is considered final and is thus bound by res judicata... Decisions that do not rest on the merits, however, are not bound by res judicata because the claims were not properly heard. Thus, these claims may be brought forth in a subsequent case, excluding dismissals due to a failure to state a claim.
In addition, from Federated Department Stores, Inc. v. Moitie [0]:
> The dismissal for failure to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) is a "judgment on the merits." See Angel v. Bullington, 330 U. S. 183, 330 U. S. 190 (1947); Bell v. Hood, 327 U. S. 678 (1946).
Your comment appears to imply otherwise. Did I misread it?
> conflating "on the merits" with determining facts by considering evidence.
Do you mind elaborating on the difference?
My comment wasn't very clear. Sorry about that. Usually we think of a judgment "on the merits" as one that occurs after considering both the law and facts of a case.
> Do you mind elaborating on the difference?
In the case of a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, the judge in theory assumes that the facts alleged in the complaint are all true. If he dismisses the case, it is because as a matter of law the plaintiff cannot win. In such a case it is incorrect to say that the evidence was found to be lacking because the evidence was never considered.
I feel like now the disputable phrase is "considering the evidence". Is the judge not considering the evidence when deciding that the presented facts/evidence are insufficient to support the complaint, even when assumed to be true? How would such a ruling differ from a hypothetical one where the case goes to trial and the defense does literally nothing? Is the evidence considered in the latter case but not the former?
I'm fully aware of how lawyers use the term, but that's immaterial to the import being given to the term in this discussion. To the extent that whether a case was decided “on the merits” is being used as a proxy for the argument that the probative value of the evidence actually in the Trump campaign’s hands in claims of election fraud has not been evaluated, it is only valid if you consider any decision (even of “procedural” rather than “on the merits” in traditional legal categorization) where, in fact, that evidence was weighed by a standard at least as favorable as it would be at trial and nevertheless found wanting.
Edit: I think we're in agreement that "on the merits" here is being conflated with a trial that considers the probative value of evidence. They are not the same thing.
It is also true that most of these were tossed for things like standing. But the idea that courts "refused to hear the evidence" is exactly the kind of fake news / Big Lie argumentation that spawned the cases to begin with.
Court cases contesting elections are routine and normal. We deal with them in every close election. These failed because they were bad cases, not because of any technical machination or deep conspiracy.
In the ones I’ve read that were tossed for standing or laches, most of them (possibly all, I don’t remember a specific counterexample) were also tossed for failure to state a claim, because while the plaintiffs did usually recite the textbook elements of a cause of action, they either failed to allege specific factual claims that would establish each of those elements, or the evidence that they proferred to support those specific fact claims was insufficient to make a prima facie case.
Such a dismissal, while “procedural” in a sense, is also a decision on the merits – it is literally exactly a finding that if the plaintiff proved everything the evidence they claim to have could support regarding the claims they made, and the other party just let it all pass without challenge or counterevidence or presenting their own case, then the plaintiff would still lose on the merits.
Dominion seems to be very clearly a “Limited Purpose Public Figure” in the domain in which the disputed statements apply.
Their lack of general celebrity is a good argument that they aren’t an “all purpose” public figure.
Well, it's not that strange, if you look at how frequently mere threats of defamation lawsuits are used to chill free speech.
But the defamer in this case is the President of the United States and his legal team. That sort of falls down.
No, it's that enforcement of laws against defamation, as an act of government, should not intrude upon freedom of speech more than is essential to serve a compelling government interest, and that legitimate government interest is at its nadir when the issue involves restricting criticism on interests of public importance, which includes public figures (whether general public figures or limited purpose ones within the scope in which they are such figures.)
I wouldn't call it unfortunate. If you don't want to be a public figure, one thing of which to steer clear is certainly the business of operating voting systems in the US presidential election. This is clearly public interest.
The Covenant Kid was thrust into the media and when he sued for defamation, at least some judges accepted the claim that he was a public figure — even though he was suing over the very thing that thrust him into the national spotlight.
Obama was a public official, so the standards for public figures that aren’t public officials wouldn’t apply.
A skilled liar would never for a moment reveal that they did not truly believe what they were saying, not even in private correspondence. Even in typical, not overtly evil companies, the saying "write for the subpoena" is passed around as advice for would-be upfront communicators.
Still, if criminals never made mistakes the justice system would convict almost nobody of anything.
I feel like Giuliani got himself stuck between a rock and a hard place here by filing actual lawsuits.
At that point, he either had to (1) include his claims about Dominion (which were extremely relevant to his lawsuits) and open himself up to perjury or (2) leave his claims out, providing pretty damning evidence in a defamation suit that he didn't believe the evidence himself.
He went with (2) and he only has a tiny bit of wiggle room to prove that he believed the claims / "evidence" but they wouldn't be useful to include in his lawsuits.
Powell and Wood relied on donations for their work and Wood in particular is a multi-millionaire many times over for some of the corporate work he's done. I'm sure Rudy is rich, mostly from the speech circuit post 9/11, but he's not Lin Wood rich. He probably needs to work to maintain his lifestyle.
Giuliani deserves whatever is coming to him.
This seems to be a standard trope but I've never met anyone who fit it.
It also makes you wonder why he needs to bother.
It needs to be clearly and forcefully demonstrated that knowingly and recklessly and maliciously lying to the public with the intention of causing harm to a company or individual like this carries heavy consequences.
I feel like this is the problem with the discourse right now. It's understandable why you're making that argument, because the media has been saying that for months now. Because in fact a large number of cases were dismissed (so it's not technically a lie), but it's only rhetorically effective if you don't look at the details.
So then we end up with this massive polarization because one side keeps relying on an argument that sounds very convincing to their base who never hear the counterargument, but will never convince the other side who have, and then there is never reconciliation. Or even a motive to find more convincing arguments that there wasn't fraud, because they're only talking to their base and not even trying to convince the other side.
So this is another example of the same thing. Rhetorically effective if you don't look at the details, so media stories everywhere, but not convincing to the other side.
And part of this is a problem specifically because they never really got to have a trial and do discovery and all of that. Because if you go through the whole process then it comes out one way or the other. But if the cases get dismissed on procedure then you have one side saying "all your cases were dismissed so shut up" and the other side saying they never actually got their day in court and nothing to ever reconcile them because both statements are true.
The lower court seemed to indicate they were going to win on it before it was dismissed on procedure.
> disenfranchising 6 million voters who voted in good faith per their individual US Constitutional right would never be a sensical remedy for an error in procedure by officials.
The problem is that once the election has been conducted in violation of the law, that has already happened. The total you have is inaccurate and you don't actually know who won, so choosing anyone based on it is disenfranchising anybody who voted for someone else.
Now, I think at one point they were asking to just throw out all of the mail in ballots, which is ridiculous. Some kind of sensible remedy might have been to hold the election again or have the state legislature decide. But then when they started asking for that, people were calling it a coup attempt, as if voting for electors who then vote for President is perfectly democratic and reasonable, but voting for legislators who vote for electors who vote for President according to the constitutional procedure is some kind of seditious tyranny.
And what's the alternative? State officials can violate election procedures with impunity because there is no remedy? Surely you can see how that could be abused for partisan advantage by whoever is in control of the state government.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-fede...
And don't ask for state legislators to pick the winner, either. Voters weren't voting for presidential electors when they voted for state legislators.
And don't say "you don't actually know who won". Yes, we do in fact know perfectly well who won. What you perhaps mean is "we don't know who would have won under what the rules should have been." Well, perhaps, but we know who won under what the rules were. You don't want that set of rules? Sue before the election. You had months.
A real cynic might think that they knew before and said nothing, just to keep open the grounds for a lawsuit in case they lost. Laches is a perfect response to that kind of game.
> The problem is that once the election has been conducted in violation of the law, that has already happened. The total you have is inaccurate and you don't actually know who won.
If votes are cast in good faith by citizens following the voting laws as they are communicated and there is no evidence either of material fraud or of a material number of voters being disenfranchised, then you very likely do have an accurate total, right? If the election is a violation of the law because it disenfranchised enough voters to make a material difference in the outcome, that would be a different matter, but that was never actually in question here. Even if all the mail-in votes that had been "cured" had been thrown out, Biden would have still won the state. This is why Trump's team asked to have all mail-in votes thrown out: a more reasonable restitution wouldn't have achieved the outcome they wanted, e.g., Trump being awarded the state's electoral college votes regardless of the popular vote tally.
(And, AnimalMuppet is also right: every state that changed election laws in 2020 changed them, by definition, before the election. Raising objections to those laws after the election because your guy didn't win -- and only in those states -- is, well, suspect.)
They specifically either did not make or withdrew fraud allegations in many cases. It's true that the PA case is the only one where Giuliani was stupid enough to repeatedly invoke fraud in arguments despite it not being in the allegations or evidence in that case, thereby getting questioned by the judge on that point, and thus being forced to admit his arguments on those points weren't germane to the actual lawsuit he was discussing (similar, though different in detail problems were endemic to the Trump/Kraken lawsuits, like broad claims of counting irregularities in lawsuits in one state being supported by detailed allegations specifying specific facilities in another state.)
> And part of this is a problem specifically because they never really got to have a trial and do discovery and all of that.
False. A number of the election cases went to trial (6 out of 54 tracked on Wikipedia reached a final verdict after trial, and 1 is listed as trial ongoing, though that may be out of date).
> But if the cases get dismissed on procedure then you have one side saying "all your cases were dismissed so shut up" and the other side saying they never actually got their day in court and nothing to ever reconcile them because both statements are true.
Well, procedure matters. Especially when you deliberately delay claims you believed you had simply to prevent the availability of simple remedies. If you have a problem with cases dismissed for gross procedural failings, take it up with the people who bungled the procedure in dozens of separate cases.
The general point being that they did make and did not withdraw fraud allegations in other cases.
> A number of the election cases went to trial (6 out of 54 tracked on Wikipedia reached a final verdict after trial, and 1 is listed as trial ongoing, though that may be out of date)
Which implies that the large majority of them didn't, doesn't it? It's not as if they were all fungible.
> Well, procedure matters.
Sure it does. But it has the result that it has. Nobody ever decides the merit of the claims dismissed on procedure.
So, here’s a challenge. Find one case where:
(1) Trump or his campaign alleges electoral fraud, and (2) The case (or specifically the fraud claim, if these are separate) was dismissed other than voluntarily by the plaintiff, and the grounds for that dismissal do not include any that require an evaluation of the merits of the case based on the allegations and proferred evidence. Notably, this means that you can’t include any case/claim dismissed for failure to state a claim, or that was dismissed voluntarily by Trump or his campaign.
That PA case was a real shitshow, and actually involved several claims from several parties in the same case:
* Act 77 was PA-state unconstitutional (despite the PA Supreme Court refusing to agree), and that makes it federal unconstitutional.
* Relatedly, state courts enforcing changes to state law under state constitutions are (federal) unconstitutional modifications to election procedures, because only state legislatures can change election procedures [this was a really daft argument].
* Some counties didn't give their residents a chance to cure their ballots
* Observers weren't permitted to stand as closely as the Republicans wanted to the ballot counting tables
While the constitutionality of Act 77 would have been their strongest argument had they challenged it in state court, they didn't in the case in the question (because they already lost that case), and they combined it with several other cases to argue over every nitpick they could find in PA. If Giuliani seriously believed that the machine counts were wrong in PA, I suspect he would have tacked that on to the case, as they were already claiming everything else.
Not only him but also other Trump lawyers on separate occasions in Pennsylvania. See for example https://www.newsweek.com/trump-campaign-lawyer-tells-pa-judg...
There was a similar story in Arizona: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-cries-election-fraud-in-c...
The media reported it like that because it was accurate. There's talk of sanctioning some of the lawyers for bringing some of the more frivolous lawsuits
There is no good faith counterargument based in facts, it's either conspiratorial nonsense, humungous misunderstandings or lies
Only Sidney Powell cases claimed issues with dominion. The Arizona case was tossed because the evidence was not reliable. Most of the 50+ lawsuits claimed procedural issues and not fraud. Claiming mail-in ballots violated the equal protection clause was brought up heavily even though they've been used for over a hundred years and the Giuliani voted by mail in 2020 election.
The supreme court case brought by other state AGs claimed PA violated their own state constitution. I still don't understand how an AG from another state can sue another state for issues pertaining their own constitution in federal court. Federal court doesn't have jurisdiction to rule if an act violates a states constitution.
The issue is that their leaders are more than happy to just lie to them constantly, reality be damned. And they don’t know, or they don’t care that they’re being lied to.
Several judges punted on standing and laches but also said that even if they heard the case, it would not end up in the favor of the plaintiff because they were silly issues to bring up.
The GOP attorneys were basically arguing that the letter of the law says that only state legislatures have the right to do anything with regards to elections. They also asked the courts to grant state legislatures powers that they do not normally possess. These are complete nonsense and always has been. State legislatures don't actually do anything. They pass laws that direct how the rest of government operates, along with the limits of discretion those other branches have.
Everybody who paid ANY attention in this past election knows that their own states did these same things. Texas sent that lawsuit to the US Supreme Court. It was idiotic on standing issues alone, but also because they only challenged the actions of states that did not vote for Trump. Texas itself had an executive who changed the rules during the election. North Carolina also did this. They KNOW this.
But it's easier to believe that the election was stolen than it is to believe that the country chose someone who is the antithesis of the guy you supported, and so that's what they do.
If you knew months before the election that the rules were being changed, why not file a lawsuit then? Why wait until after the election, when you've got the deadline of the Electoral College vote, and your lawsuit is going to literally disenfranchise every voter in the state?
Laches isn't a punt. It's sanity in the face of insane lawsuits trying to game the court system.
And laches is, you didn't like the rules? Sue before the election; you had plenty of time. You wait until after? No, we're not going to let you hold the election hostage. Suing after looks like you didn't like the results you got under the rules, but you didn't have a problem with the rules going in. Why should the courts let you throw out everybody's vote because you didn't like the results? Why do you not think that is ridiculous?
"The record establishes that Wisconsin's selection of its 2020 Presidential Electors was conducted in the very manner established by the Wisconsin Legislature, by general ballot at the general election... plaintiff has not shown a significant departure from the Wisconsin Legislature's chosen election scheme ... This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his reply brief, plaintiff 'asks that the Rule of law be followed.' It has been"
Try again, my dude. Just because you paid attention to one singular case doesn't mean that judges didn't rule on the merit of the case anywhere.
Second: I misread your comment as saying that it was ridiculous for the judges to not rule on the merits. I agree with you that the (alleged) merits of the cases were ridiculous.
Have you heard of Antrim County? Everybody on the right heard of it on November 5th. https://www.westernjournal.com/michigan-recount-confirms-tru...
This is "fact checked" by many left leaning websites to indicate it is false. But even the "fact checkers" admit that Trump actually won Antrim county. Their "fact check" ridicules that the 2nd recount, after the reversing of the dominion glitch that gave 3000 Trump votes to Biden, only netted Trump a few more votes after that. But the way the "fact check" articles are presented make the reader believe the whole thing is bullshit. It's not. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/1...
I don’t believe that is true. As far as I know, there weren’t really any claims of voter fraud from Trump’s legal team.
It was scotus decided that yes, legislatures can delegate powers, but no matter what they do; the legislature can never lose this power as it is specifically enumerated in Article 2.
This became moot in 2000 as the recount ended discussion.
Of the states in question, I do not believe GA, MI, or AZ legislatures delegated powers to the Gov or AGs, but I could be mistaken on that.
The so-called "actual malice" standard doesn't require proof of intent to damage reputation. It only requires proof that the defendant said the defamatory statement "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964). (This is important because Rudy probably didn't care one way or the other about Dominion's reputation; they were just collateral damage as far as he was concerned.)
Notice that Dominion, in their filing comes right out swinging for that very ball. They start out with multiple cases where Rudy publicly alleged fraud then in the related court proceedings, did not alleged the same fraud.
Dominion makes a pretty good case in their filing that Rudy knew his sources were not reliable and so he avoided making those same accusations in court. They also show multiple examples of Rudy publicly making these fraud claims on his show while selling products like cigars and cyber security services. "just use the code word 'rudy' to get 20% off your purchase."
Everyone seems to agree that diversity is a good thing that leads to better overall outcomes, but then some of those people think that doesn't apply to diversity of ideas. Much of America's success can be attributed to being a melting pot of all types of people, and the mix of ideas they brought to the table. This recent trend of extreme censorship and "cancel culture" is bad for everyone long term, even if you agree with it in the short term.
Whatever the problems experienced in the initial tabulation because of a mismatch between client and server software revisions, it is very difficult to falsify paper ballots especially under so much recount scrutiny.
The ‘expert’ in the Antrim document also claimed over 100% of registered voters voted in various Michigan counties but was actually using Minnesota data. It was buffoonery of the absolute highest order and plainly visible. Why anyone would rely upon someone so incompetent for any other analysis is beyond me.
Oh, right, equally ludicrous is the misadministration by a Republican county clerk is cause for disenfranchising a vote by the opposing party.
For her part though, the county clerk called shenanigans:
‘Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy all pushed back on the report.
Guy, a Republican, said she was saddened by the efforts to discredit the equipment.
I did read the report and find that there are many misleading statements that are simply not accurate.”’
Care to share?
If anything, I can see the potential for an argument to be made that that that site's definition of "decided on merits" is too narrow. For example, depositions were submitted in Law v. Whitmer, significant parts of the decision were dedicated specifically to discussing the merits of the case, and the conclusion specifically says that the plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of proof, but that case is listed as "Decided on Merits: NO".
I remember this county being an early catch that angered many on the right, where people actually made an effort to recount. I wonder how many here are aware of it? https://www.westernjournal.com/michigan-recount-confirms-tru...
We are told by the "fact check" websites that we may (and must) disregard the conclusions [2] that Navid Keshavarz-Nia [1] swore an affidavit to, because there is no proof. But how can we get such proof without the cases actually being heard? Left leaning people in general, and HN posters in particular have a disdain for those who make up the non-urban, non-coastal heart of the USA. But wouldn't it have been better to allow these cases to come to trial, so that the nation could actually determine the facts and begin to heal?
[1] https://www.wnd.com/2020/11/4873267/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20201202043332/https://www.court...
Please cite a specific case which made claims that were not properly adjudicated on the basis of this supposed “catch-22”.
Oh look it's the successor to WindpowerFacts.info, run by a climate change denier. I'm so ready to trust his opinion on legal matters.
At least the links I checked (the only thing linked is the title of each case) were to the complaints, so they aren’t sources for the data in the table about the outcomes or grounds for the outcomes.
Incorrect, read some of the cases. Quite a few were dismissed on the merits. Literally your own link says “YES” in the Decided on Merits column! Did you not read your link?
Some of the later cases were not decided on merits because they were filed so late (e.g., suing over a change suggested by Republicans used in the 2016 Wisconsin election to fill in missing zip codes and then used again in 2020, or a change passed by Republican legislators in 2019 and promoted by them to the public in 2020 in Pennsylvania, and only complained about after Biden won).
However, some courts did reach the merits and found the claims of Trump campaign and his allies to be completely meritless. Note that Giuliani and his associates, when under oath in court, stated their cases were not fraud cases but then went to press conferences and claimed they were.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/politics/federal-judge-dismis...
> Judge Matthew Brann of the US District Court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania called the Trump campaign's case "Frankenstein's monster" for its poorly stitched together legal theories.
>
> On Friday, a federal appeals court dealt the Trump campaign's effort another blow, with a Trump-appointed judge writing in a scathing opinion that the campaign's lawsuit lacked proof and that its allegations in Pennsylvania "have no merit."
Even so, the entire idea that a group of hucksters can completely annihilate the reputation of a company based on absolute nonsense from a bunch of angry losers is a bit frightening.
Republicans have been claiming for years, completely
without merit, that Dominion has been involved in a
variety of vote-changing schemes
Your question implies that you feel that Dominion is somehow different from other companies doubted by democrats, and itself must never be doubted. Why is it different?
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-market-for-voting-mac... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en/Election_Systems_&_Software https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/chinese-parts-hidden-owners...
I also recall seeing liberal concern over Dominion in GA prior to the election. Regardless, it's a powerful industry with a justifiably large amount of public scrutiny, even if we don't always get the transparency we deserve. All of these systems should be public, open source, and verifiable with paper trails.
I also doubt Trump is the end point.
So now their owners[1] need to figure out how to get whatever value they can. This isn't a "campaign", it's just a business effort. They've been transformed into something like an IP holding company, where the IP is the damage suffered by the original outfit. They'll sue everyone they can.
(They'll also probably manage to recoup some value by selling what's left of the company to someone else who then rebrands them and tries to sell back into the markets that have been poisoned. Something very similar happened with Diebold a decade ago, which was then sold to ES&S and thence to, yes, Dominion.)
[1] No idea how they're structured, but per wikipedia they're a private corporation.
So the issue isn't "electronic voting" vs. "paper ballots".
The fact that it takes as long as it does in the US and there is still a fear that it's not secure or that it's suspicious--no matter how wrong that fear may be--is a problem. And it's not a "dumb normies need more education about statistics" problem. It's a problem created by forcing a "solution" that is unnecessary (paper ballots, counted by hand work fine) and unnecessarily complicated.
If people dont understand that printed paper ballots cant be changed by an air gapped electronic system you wont gain their trust anyway.
Electronic voting is unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated. Your response to this is basically “they’re too dumb to to understand and so don’t matter anyway.”
"Your response to this is basically “they’re too dumb to to understand and so don’t matter anyway.”" No, my response is that a pure paper ballot system wont change a thing and would just shift the conspiracy theories to other parts of the system.
The core of defamation is (1) a false statement of purported fact that (2) causes damage (there are some exceptions to (2) that aren't relevant here). Most defamation cases you hear about fall apart on (1) - they target non-falsifiable statements of opinion, which can't be defamation because they don't purport to relate an objective fact. What makes Dominion's cases terrifying is that they are chock full of purported facts, all of which are batshit, and have so devastated Dominion's reputation, in a reputation-intensive business, that it had to hire private security to protect its employees from death threats.
What makes the case challenging for Dominion is that they will almost certainly be treated as a public figure for the purposes of the case. The standard for defamation of a public figure is higher than that of a normal person; we add a condition (3): actual malice or negligence, meaning Dominion must show that Giuliani either intended to destroy Dominion's reputation by spreading facts he knew to be false, or that he was at least negligent, acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
The problem is that it's not totally clear whether Giuliani believed any of his crazy-talk. It may actually be the case that Giuliani is just off his rocker. If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.
Here's attorney Akiva Cohen analyzing the case a bit:
https://twitter.com/AkivaMCohen/status/1353700596407283721