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.