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..