As far as I know he only said that in the Pennsylvania case, because they had quite a strong argument there that the rules changes made in Pennsylvania violated their state constitution, and then given limited time/resources they went with the argument there that was easier to prove. But that was one of the cases dismissed over procedure. The courts essentially said they should have complained about it before the election instead of after.

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.

I don’t think their argument was particularly strong, and even if it was, 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.

> I don’t think their argument was particularly strong

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.

The decision itself is worth reading. It is not reflective of your characterization, either on the merits or on the appropriateness of the proposed remedy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-fede...

The alternative is, sue before the election, so that the election is held with the correct procedure. You had months. Don't sue after the election.

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.

They had four years to do something about this apparently pressing, urgent, critical threat to democracy.

Not four years, no. IIRC, the changes to the rules were made ~6 months before the election. But they didn't file suit then. They only filed after the election.

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 Pennylvania case wasn't dismissed solely on procedure; it was dismissed on lack of merit. The claim that Trump's team made was that because some counties allowed voters to "cure" mail-in ballots if they were going to be thrown out and some didn't, that was unlawful. Multiple courts up the chain kept saying "no, this is not actually a thing." The Third Circuit's 3-0 ruling against them said, in these words, "The Campaign cannot win this lawsuit" because they "had to plead plausible facts, not just conclusory allegations". They went on to note that the number of mail-in ballots actually affected by the claims were "far smaller" than Biden's margin of victory.

> 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.)

> As far as I know he only said that in the Pennsylvania case

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.

> They specifically either did not make or withdrew fraud allegations in many 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.

It's worth noting that many of the claims were dismissed due to the procedural problem of not making a legal claim. If you file a lawsuit in which you yell at the opposing side without making any specific allegations as to what happened that deserves legal remedy, your case will be thrown out because it doesn't make any sense. That was what happened to about half of the election cases. Accusations of fraud need to be plead "with particularity". This means that in your initial filing, you have to allege a specific fraudulent action that was carried out by a specific group of people. The main thing that led election fraud cases to be thrown out was that no fraud was found, and none of the lawyers were willing to get disbarred by lying to the court. As such, all of the cases that shouted fraud were missing the description of what the fraud actually was. As such, the judges dismissed them because there wasn't a viable claim.

> The general point being that they did make and did not withdraw fraud allegations in other cases.

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.

> As far as I know he only said that in the Pennsylvania case, because they had quite a strong argument there that the rules changes made in Pennsylvania violated their state constitution, and then given limited time/resources they went with the argument there that was easier to prove. But that was one of the cases dismissed over procedure.

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.

>As far as I know he only said that in the Pennsylvania case

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...