I’d be much more worried about the absolutely insane nonsense that Giuliani and his ilk have been spewing. That is far more damaging to voting machine research than this lawsuit.
>This is my contribution to the Trump team's legal case against election fraud. The Kraken was a crowdsourced legal case that they were building with the help of hundreds of volunteer experts, but most of it never got to see the light of day. We were explicitly told not to release any information to the public because that could undermine their case, since it would expose our work to the ongoing media slander campaign and allow the defense to more easily prepare counterarguments. Clearly that's no longer a concern, so I'm publicly releasing my contribution to the case.
>The key takeaway of this analysis is that the Biden vs. Trump advantage of a vote tally reporting batch is highly (i.e. extremely) correlated with meta information about the counting process itself. This implies that if you counted the votes a different way you would have gotten a different final total, which is absolutely preposterous and a clear indicator of fraud. Additionally, we don't see this happen
In case anyone else was about to waste a couple minutes of their life that they will never get back, a quick warning that you will never get the minutes of your life back that you lose paging through this very silly Python notebook, which was very clearly created to snow people who don't know what a Python notebook looks like.
As long as potentially hackable voting machines are used in elections, the anxiety about hacking will be there and will eventually be exploited by politicians. If we want to fix the issue, we really just need to move back to hand counting paper ballots.
Dominion voting machines leave an auditable paper trail and thus do support hand-counting of paper ballots, which was done as part of the recounts in disputed states. No discrepancies beyond the margin of error of hand counting were found in those recounts vs the electronically reported results.
I'm not saying they were hacked. I'm saying the layman needs to be confident beyond a reasonable doubt. A normal non-security professional needs to understand and have confidence in the system they use to vote. Most people don't even know how to troubleshoot computer issues beyond rebooting, let alone understanding complex IT security or auditing measures put in place for these machines.
If you watch the video you can see that a layman would easily understand how it all works. It literally prints a ballot where you can verify your choices, and you drop it off.
This is pretty much the gold standard: a paper trail that can be audited every step of the process.
Still not sufficient though, you only need to hack enough to get outside the automatic recount margin. You also need hand-recount of random samples in all elections.
Of course, if someone hypothetically hacked an election even more brazenly to get outside of that margin, the result would be even more unexpected and likely to be manually contested.
You only need to recount heavily when the election is near 50%, because the higher the margin of victory, the fewer random samples you need to detect fraud. This is what Georgia actually does. The automatic margin is for runoff elections.
Yes, this election was the most secure due to the paper trail that mail-in ballots provide. I would trust that more than the bits of a closed, black voting box
For a community (HN) so focused on technology and the future, I'm surprised to see support for antiquated technology such as paper ballots.
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else? You can even buy a house from your phone now. In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
I disagree with your conclusion. Voting does not need to be made more convenient beyond preventing obvious voter suppression and making election day a federal and/or state holiday.
Additionally, a digital compromise of a fully digital system could compromise all votes. If the system has a nondigital artifact it can reference as a source of truth, then it can be validated, verified, and restored to truth.
A federal holiday would be fantastic. The main benefit is not getting more people to vote, but getting more people to watch the polls & counting. The more opportunity that people have to watch, the more faith people will have in the system.
With the election process, optics is as important as the actual security. It has to seem simple and secure for most people to accept the results easily. We saw recently that even that does not always work but I have hope it was an aberration. Can you imagine the fallout if everything was done digitally instead, considering the average person’s understanding of crypto and “hackers”?
I'm surprised to see support for antiquated technology such as paper ballots.
"Antiquated" is a loaded word that smacks of ageism. Restaurants are antiquated, too. Do you never go out to eat?
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else?
Are you trying to say that every other country votes paperless? Because that's simply not true.
You can even buy a house from your phone now
You have obviously never bought a house, and certainly not one from your phone. Just because there's an ad on YouTube doesn't make it true.
In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
Why is that necessary? What benefit does it provide?
The future is paperless.
People have been saying that for over a hundred years. Yet, here we are, still with a durable, recordable medium that does things that paperless methods can't.
> For a community (HN) so focused on technology and the future, I'm surprised to see support for antiquated technology such as paper ballots.
I'm not. No one understands as well as technologists how often “novel technology” represents a regression from the tried and true, and how much the cry of “new” is used to sell defective crap.
> You can even buy a house from your phone now.
This is technically partially true in that a lot (not all) home purchase and finance paperwork can be done via electronically signed documents, and if you have a tolerance for extremely bad UI you can sign those on a phone. Typically, you’ll still need some wet signatures (notarized even) at the end of the process.
But that’s, even if it was completely accurate, a different problem domain than voting. (Both have concerns for assurance, but only one also has nonattribution as a critical goal.)
Once you know how the sausage is made, sometimes you don't want to eat sausages.
I actually do think that digital voting is theoretically possible, if done cautiously and in an open source manner. (it needs to be fully open source to be verifiable at all)
A remaining problem is that -in an election system- every voter needs to be able to check and perceive that the election was honest. That could still be a bit tricky in a society where not everyone is a programmer.
One big barrier to online voting is that you don't want people to be able to be forced to show their votes which makes any kind of verification immensely difficult (you have to accomodate people needing to show a fake verification) because otherwise you leave things open to voter intimidation and vote buying.
Another is that by going online you instantly open the attack surface up massively. Currently to steal an election you have to physically move a large number of people to a broad set of voting sites or send in a lot of forged mail votes. Those both require physically doing something in the US where an online system lets anyone in the world potentiall attack the system.
Hand counting can be manipulated too [0], so the idea that we can just move back to it and save our democracy is not accurate (or at least not a complete solution). In other words, dishonest politicians will find ways to exploit our fears even if we use paper ballots.
You linked to an abstract of the Russian vote manipulation behind a paywall. That abstract says nothing specifically about hand-count being manipulated.
Hand counting remains the golden standard for voting.
All allegations against Dominion voting machines were pretty much disproved by subsequent manual vote courting. Again, the machines leave a paper trail that allows manual counting for verification. That makes simple handcounting without any assistance more prone to errors and less paper trail as well.
In what world would manual counting have less paper trail?
What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.
All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?
Voting by hand takes days, which is why it is only done automatically for close elections.
However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.
If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.
Voting by hand takes days - in the US. Not in Finland, France or the many other countries where voting is done by hand 100% successfully for decades with timely results.
Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).
If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.
> Scale matters. 160 million votes were cast in the U.S. in each of the past 2 elections.
> 36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
> The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
I don't understand this argument. In France, a population of roughly 67 million people can count 36 million ballots by hand overnight. That's 1.86 people per ballot.
In the US 328 million people cast 160 million ballots. That's 2.05 people per ballot.
Since counting is done at each individual polling place, what's actually keeping the US from doing the same as France? It's not like they're shipping around all of the ballots to one place, and they're limited by geometry and ballot distribution to volunteer counters. Create a polling place per 10,000 people, and within X miles of everyone. Smaller polling places would finish faster, but the big polling places don't really have to scale past what European countries already count successfully every election.
Voting in France is like a rain spread out over the country, because the population is more spread out across geographic centers. It's easier to handle votes.
Voting in the U.S. is like a series of scattered torrential downpours, because more than 70% of the population lives in a metropolitan area. It's not simply a matter of the number of bodies, at the scale the U.S. metro areas deal with you have significant concerns about the physical logistics related to moving that many ballots that much smaller, less dense countries do not have.
No one ever claimed that hand-counting is perfect. Is isn't. For example, all of the Chicago ballot boxes that famously ended up in Lake Michigan in the middle of the last century.
But hand-counting works because it's virtually impossible to coordinate fraud widespread enough to actually make a difference. Whereas, if your entire voting system is computerized and all the computers are linked together, causing widespread changes are much more possible.
Also, be aware that Dominion voting systems actually acquired the old "Diebold Election Systems", who were not so secure a couple of years back. (though things may have changed by now, of course)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
Note that it looks like the states on that list that have “DREs without VVPAT” (electronic machines without a paper trail) are Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas on that list, along with some DREs without VVPAT in Kansas and Mississippi.
Since Trump won 7/8 of those states, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that Trump’s team successfully hacked the electronic machines in those states that have no paper trail.
However, there’s really very little reason to believe there was fraud in this election - but those republican states (and New Jersey) should replace their DREs without VVPAT by the next election so that they have a secure paper trail for auditing.
Even that won't stop the lies about the election being stolen. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia are all paper ballot states [0] counted by machine but preserved for manual recounts. The lie just became that there was either ballot stuffing at some point, a point which changed every time a claim was disproven, or that the Dominion tabulation machines changed some Trump votes to Biden votes. Even Members who were elected in that very same election were saying it was fraudulent, just not their votes of course.
Nothing can "fix the issue" when the issue is primarily that some candidates will not accept a losing outcome.
Had this election been entirely hand-counted, the same claims of fraud would have arisen. When a candidate declares in advance of an election that he can only lose if there is fraud, you can be sure he will act in bad faith if he loses.
Incredulity was all he needed to claim fraud - the numerous conspiracy theories explaining the fraud would inevitably surface after the fact. If it's not Dominion voting machines, it's dead voters, boxes of ballots showing up, and hand wavy claims of the opposition being in charge of the counting and abusing that role.
If you think that voting machine hacking is a genuine issue, then you should want Giuliani to shut up and go away ASAP. Having your arguments mixed up with crazy pants conspiracy theories is a one way ticket to people deciding that you’re also a crank to be ignored.
It has been fascinating to watch recent events unfold, wherein various horrible things including direct threats to democracy have happened due to people increasingly being able to just completely make up stuff, and spread it around readily and effectively on unfiltered internet mediums, and a great number of people's immediate concern is that free speech may get quelled too much which will do great harm.
This here is another example, nobody did any voting security research, some Trump associates just made up the idea, and were able to easily spread that messages to millions of people, playing a large part in inciting an attempted coup. The maker of that device is now suing for damages, as they should, and your concern is free speech again.
Anyone actually involved in voting machine security research, and not just a fraudulent troll like Rudy Giuliani, welcomes this lawsuit. His unhinged spouting of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories has only harmed and discredited legitimate voting security research.
It'll be a win/win situation if baseless allegations of fraud are punished, and every detail of how voting machines work, including source code, are made public.
Yes, security by obfuscation is not good but imagine a bad actor discovers a bug and by the time the bug gets discovered and patched they could do a lot of harm in an election. Somehow I agree with the idea of making the code public only with the idea in mind that it gets scrutinized my more eyeballs but since we're talking about elections maybe this changes the perspective a bit?
If you have the access to the machines to hack a number of them you likely already have the access to dump and analyze the source code, the physical access required is basically the same in both cases and getting the code initially is easier because you only need one machine (/maybe/ two to see if there's any interesting differences) where the final hack would require more. Also just because the code isn't released doesn't mean it's secure that same bad actor can theoretically hack the same code out of the writing company to start with.
It's a debate we've had with secure messengers the benefit of having that many eyes on a piece of software outweighs the minor risk of a secret zero day.
Not if they are secure. In the security community, if the integrity of the platform requires information about the platform to be secret, it's not secure.
The keys should be secure, but the design of algorithms and implementation of the system should not be.
Not at all, it's actually the opposite. Security by obscurity is a terrible way of securing software since once someone backward-engineers it, you're hacked. Instead, if you open source it, all security researchers will be able to audit the code and be paid bounty money if they find bugs (and believe me, they will find bugs).
Open sourcing software security flaws more prone to discovery, but also enables more people to discover the flaws, which can be a good thing.
If you hide away the source code, then only criminal actors and security agencies can evaluate security flaws. Open sourcing, at least, places legitimate security researchers on equal footing with these groups, so flaws can be disclosed publicly and rectified.
That being said, I think there are sufficient safeguards in the process that effectively mitigate any potential compromising of Dominion software. The software prints out the voters' ballot and the voter is given an opportunity to review the ballot before scanning it with a separate machine and it entering a locked box. This allows for a manual recount to guard against any possible shenanigans.
One additional step they could take, would be for the voter to verify their vote after scanning. This would ensure that they actually read the ballot. Though I could see that causing problems if the voter, for whatever reason, decided to repudiate their vote while travelling between the two machines.
The thing that confounds me is that this is the same guy who took down organized crime in NYC the 1990s. No small task, and one that required meticulous gathering and handling of evidence. And then later he was a very successful mayor. Are we to believe he's simply gone insane in his old age?
I’m reminded of an xkcd alt text, “ There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.”
Good thing Dominion voting machines do leave an auditable paper trail, which was hand-audited in all of these disputed states and which verified the electronically-reported results.
Even a cursory review of the Ramsland report you linked to indicates it was largely fiction. From the politifact review:
Ramsland lists "Fenton" without specifying Fenton City or Fenton Township. But the turnout Ramsland lists for Fenton does not match the turnout in either jurisdiction.
The actual turnout statistics reveal the inaccuracy of Ramsland’s numbers. His figure for North Muskegon is off by a factor of 10: The actual number is 78.11%, not 781.91%. For Zeeland Charter Township, he inflated the turnout nearly sixfold. For Grout Township and the City of Muskegon, his number is more than triple the correct number.
"A staggering number of votes required adjudication.This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles stillstored on the server.This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots withno oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years. The statement attributing these issues to human error is not consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machineand/or softwareerrors. The systemicerrors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulkadjudication"
"
Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack ofproviding basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system securityrequired by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures –Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a federally accredited voting system laboratory
"
"
Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of recordsprevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed.
"
First paragraph: simply made up by Ramsland, by basically treating all the times a ballot was entered incorrectly (such as upside down) as a vote requiring adjudication.
Second paragraph: False. The person in charge of updating the system...was a Republican. Also, the voting machines were in compliance with federal voting system standards. The machine that was not updated prior to the election was the computer that the voting machines connected to, which was updated after the election during vote tabulation. (A hand recount of the paper receipts printed on Election Day confirmed the post-update count.)
Third paragraph: Also fiction, and quite literally contradicts your first paragraph. (They can't both possibly be true; either the adjudication logs were there and there were a lot of adjudicated votes, or they weren't, and the first paragraph is made up.) Also, the machines were audited after the election...by Republicans.
On a further note, neither NASA or MIT has any record of Ramsland or any of his companies, doing any work for them as he claims (and which forms the basis of his supposed technical expertise).
"Likewise, all server security logs prior to 11:03 pm on November 4, 2020 are missing. This means that all security logs for the day after the election, on election day, and prior to election day are gone. Security logs are very important to an audit trail, forensics, and for detecting advanced persistent threats and outside attacks, especially on systems with outdated system files. These logs would contain domain controls, authentication failures, error codes, times users logged on and off, network connections to file servers between file accesses, internet connections, times, and data transfers. Other server logs before November 4, 2020 are present; therefore, there is no reasonable explanation for the security logs to be missing. "
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Stop making throwaway sock puppet accounts every time your lies are rightfully downvoted and your posting rights restricted. Your lies aren't "sensitive information".
We've ALL heard the tired old conspiracy theories you're parroting before, and we've ALL seen them thoroughly debunked already. You're the only one who seems surprised you were duped.
We've banned this account for ideological flamewar. Not what this site is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
In case anyone's worried about it, yes, we ban accounts for this regardless of which ideology they're flaming for. It's an existential issue for HN; we'd rather not burn to a crisp, regardless of the color of the flames.
How about you throw away your actual HN account too, because people who spread long debunked baseless conspiracy theories aren't welcome here. Good to see you're at least embarrassed to admit who you actually are. That's the first step to realizing you're been fed lies and brainwashed. Go find something to believe in that you're not embarrassed to associate with your true identity.
There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.
It's funny how things change. Just five years ago, HN was awash in people shouting that paper ballots are not secure and everyone should switch to electronic. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. Much like the way that in the 90's, keeping a password on a Post-It note was considered not secure, and now it's the safest thing going.
They could blockchain votes and have independently auditable election results easily available.
Instead, time after time, we get shady software from shady people with disturbing political connections (I’m not talking the dominion thing either — this seems true for all voting software). The idea that crooked politicians hire crooked companies to wrire crooked software shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Software does control airplanes and elevators. When it fails, it can kill people.
But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.
> When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
But why would they be distrustful unless non-sequitur arguments are presented as the holy grail of truth? "Bro trust me, software engineers and our entire profession are total hacks". Thanks XKCD, very cool.
Yet you fly in airplanes and drive in cars that are digitally controlled. You trust the unsecured web with your banking details because a green padlock appears in your browser. The federal reserve and their network banks don't mail each other IOU's "to be secure" so why should that be the MO for accounting public consensus? I'd call it tired reasoning but it's not even reasoning, it's just some hand-wavy appeal to.. p a p e r
That's implicitly assuming that you can't do cryptographic voting protocols with paper ballots. That is false. You can in fact make a cryptographic voting system where:
1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.
3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.
4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.
5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.
6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.
7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.
Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.
Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.
Researchers usually have well research and evidence to back their claims which wouldn't put them at risk like Giuliani. Giuliani has also repeated these claims that have so far been unsubstantiated repeatedly even after being asked to retract them. There is some willful level malice implied in this lawsuit that is I think is not applicable to security researchers so I'm personally not worried but I do get the general sentiment whenever libel laws are brought up.
And researchers aren't usually operating under the delusionally optimistic assumption that they'll get $20,000 per day and a presidential pardon for their work.
>These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion's supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion's machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently
That's Dominion's statement. They're describing a pretty exceptional situation / distant from what I would think of as security research.
Obviously that's not a legally binding statement or anything but I think that at least illustrates what this situation is about.
This isn't a case of someone being mistaken or putting forth a good faith concern about security.
These accusations are based in nothing at all, disproven, and Giuliani and others just kept at it.
Researchers usually have actual evidence for concerns and so forth. And their motivations usually really is security.
This situation with Giuliani and actual security research seem completely disconnected.
I think you have to be outside of America to have this perspective now, it's too drowned out inside to make sense to anyone who can only read it through the American lens. I would be less concerned with any particular legal case though, and more concerned with the chilling effects of American political culture itself. By its very nature, any supposedly disinterested researcher will now be viewed with intense suspicion.
Yeah, there's a tiny smattering of cases (the most memorable ones to me being Republican voters trying to counter supposed fraud with some fraud of their own) that get caught but nowhere near enough to impact elections. Much more prevalent though is intentional voter disenfranchisement keeping people from voting and gerrymandering.
Presumably, the issue is baseless accusations in general. It doesn't matter what side a baseless claim happens: its bad either way.
Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims).
Dominion Voting Systems is not a public figure however, its a company. That... probably makes it easier to win this case.
Still, if Dominion's lawyers think that this case is worth pursuing (despite the difficulty of defamation / libel / slander), that doesn't bode well for Rudy.
> Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more?
> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.
While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).
How would anyone know they are baseless unless a proper investigation is conducted independently? What about the thousands of sworn affidavits? Surely, ALL of them can't be lying.
You can create a sworn affidavit that says you suspected someone did something evil. It's a true statement that doesn't prove someone did something evil.
Did you read the affidavits? They include statements of fact, not just "I felt it was wrong." They can therefore be disproven with material evidence. If they are disproven with material evidence then that person will go to jail.
All that means is that there are thousands of people willing to risk jail time if they're shown to have lied. It says nothing about whether they lied or not.
For what it's worth I imagine many of them think they're telling the truth, or at least are honestly putting their name to something they've been told and believe. That also doesn't mean they're right though.
More likely is that most if not all of them saw something innocuous, but constant screaming about corruption from certain public figures colored their recollection a bit.
It's like when you hear a muffled audio recording but it's incomprehensible, and then you're told by a headline, "Can you believe Mr. X just said Y?". Then you listen again, and voila, you interpret the audio as Y. You've been primed to hear Y, so your brain hears it.
When you've been primed by all your anti-establishment media sources to see fraud, then you think back to that time 3 weeks ago when you thought you overheard two coworkers at the mail-sorting center talking about "post-dating the ballots". Well, maybe they didn't say "ballots" exactly... But it was "post-date the fourth", and surely they meant "November 4th", right? I mean election day was the 3rd, and they weren't trying to count late ballots, were they? But what else could they have meant? And they sure looked suspicious when I came over and interrupted them. I mean they didn't mention ballots again that whole conversation because I guess they were worried I would tell someone.
Reading through some of the affidavits and watching the interviews gives the impression that these are well-intentioned folks who just wanted to report something without understanding the context, and they've been primed for fraud. Unfortunately, they get picked up by politicians and media figures who have a clear pro vote-rigging agenda, and get made a martyr for the cause by plastering their face all over OANN, Project VERITAS, etc. It's depressing to watch.
As much crazy that's happened recently, I can almost believe all of them could be lying. It is "MY TEAM OR YOU SHOULD DIE!" for some of these wackadoodles.
Of those affidavits that were brought to court, many of them were tossed for being hearsay (someone swore that they heard someone else say that a third party did something), or called out standard vote counting practices as being suspicious, or were otherwise irrelevant. In many cases Trump's people went to court saying "We're not alleging fraud" and instead tried to get rules changed to throw out votes in blue areas. Evidence of actual fraud wasn't brought to court. Yes, there was some voter fraud; both Pennsylvania and Georgia found two voters each (yes, 2) who cast someone else's ballot (a deceased parent in some cases). But to flip an election you'd need thousands of people committing this kind of felony.
On top of that the fraud seems to actually have been committed mostly by the side that is accusing the other side of it.
Which makes sense, when you hear from your news sources that the other party is committing massive fraud, that gives some people an excuse to do so too.
Which was Trump's original intention for claiming the other side was committing voter fraud even before 2016, to encourage his supporters to do it "too" for him. And it worked.
I’ve read some of them. No one is necessary lying, but
most of the testimony is of the format “I think I saw somebody acting in a way that I felt was incompetent or malicious, even thought I was an outsider with little knowledge of the process” or “I witnessed abuse regarding over- or undercounting of votes” — claims which were later easily disproven by the hand counts.
I see no reason why all of them can’t be wrong (not necessarily intentionally lying).
Don't forget "somebody was wearing a lot of rhinestones." That one was probably true. Not sure what the relation was to election integrity, but it was in the binder.
From my understanding 1) many of those affidavits were just hear say with little corroborating evidence, extreme claims "The US government is fundamentally illegitimate" requires more extreme evidence than "I heard a guy who said they were a poll watch saw things go weird"
2) and other witnesses wildly embellished their credibility, Joshua Merritt, aka "Spider" aka "Spyder" was listed as a military intelligence expert, while what is able to be verified is that he enlisted in the training program but failed to complete the entry level material.
The arguments have been made, the evidence has been examined, to say /no/ investigation has occurred is willfully misinformed at this point.
It's quite obvious you have never read even one of those affidavits. Vote for or support whoever you want, but try to side with truth at the very least.
The affidavits are very explicit - they directly call out names and roles. They are specific in what was actually witnessed. Go through them if you really care about truth. Otherwise we have nothing to discuss.
In this age of postmodernism, post-truth, peek-facebook or whatever we're calling it... A "proper investigation" can't be determined to be proper unless an investigation of the investigation takes place.
At least in terms of convincing "everyone" of anything, it's turtles all the way down.
This lawsuit will be an investigation of sorts. If they aren't baseless, dominion can't win.
Baseless means that there is no proof of the allegations. Dominion is under no obligation to prove the that the election was fair. Guiliani now have the opportunity through discovery to support his allegations, or at least the was in good faith. If he fails to do so he risk being on the hook for $1B+.
It is curious that of all his public allegations against Dominion, he never asserted those in court. He is a lawyer and is aware of the consequences of asserting false accusations or frivolous suits in court. No doubt he will point to Sidney Powell and claim he was in good faith.
Most of the claims he made were pretty outlandish, and IMO he (especially as a lawyer) should now better. This is going to be interesting.
He publicly claimed that the Dominion machines "switched votes" even after the hand-count in Georgia confirmed that the machine count had indeed been accurate.
- There is a video (unless it was taken down, expectedly) that clearly showed that one can modify votes in realtime - it showed checkboxes being flipped from votes for Trump to votes for Biden & back again.
- The machines could be connected to the internet according to Dominion's own documentation, contrary to what Dominion CEO said in Michigan.
- Dominion machines were used even in Venezuela to aid a corrupt regime, which in & of itself does not prove anything, but in view of above aspects need to be looked into.
- Signatures & id's were not checked for mail in ballots & even for in person votes in at least some of the swing states. Why? It's quite remarkable that for Covid vaccines now, id's are mandatory.
- The Ratner NIA report is explicit & absolutely clear that China & Iran were able to access the Dominion systems. Please read it.
Politics aside, it looks like HN is not even able (ready) to examine what the truth is. Especially when ~30% os US population think that the election was fraudulent. If elections are themselves questionable, then do we have any hope of having a nation anymore? What if the shoe was on the other foot?? Trust but verify is all I ask. If information is censored then how will ANYONE verify anything???
Perhaps a more pertinent question comes from the perspective of realpolitik.
Which is more damaging to US political institutions, having an illegitimate president or admitting that the election was stolen?
I'd wager an admission of election changing fraud would make it almost impossible to recover any trust in political institutions. What would be the next steps from admitting that the election was fraudulent?
Given the above, I'm not sure it matters. Of course that scenario is still possible, if evidence is produced. The institutional incentives align towards keeping the results as is. Proceeding from there, what can be done to restore trust?
*Disclaimer, please do not misread this as an assertion of evidence existing, not existing or the validity of it.
We don't have realpolitik, we have an establishment building a giant razor-wire fence around itself and screaming that any objection is racism and treason.
I wasn't inclined to reflexively trust gov, even before this debacle. That's neither here nor there. I try to keep my bias out of it. Otherwise, someone from the opposing spectrum will take it as an invite for a useless argument.
What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?
It's not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We've spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity-based system back, and the other half wants a tech-humanism that is anathema to the first half.
If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.
> It’s not going to happen anytime soon in the US, but the thing that will win people over is a genuine common philosophy of some kind. We’ve spent the last 50 years doing a weird washed-out half- Christianity, and now half of us want the old Christianity back
“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.
And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.
That's fair, I'm just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was, and I think Jesus factors in there somewhere, in name. As a Catholic myself, I know well that actual religious belief isn't the main driver. Maybe I'm wrong and there never was an American mythos, but there's a palpable sense of change that isn't just outright racism.
> That’s fair, I’m just struggling to define what the prior American mythos actually was
The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.
>> The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.
> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.
In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.
Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.
There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.
The government is made of people. It's inherently fallible and manages a lot of power. It's a recipe for disaster.
We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.
Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.
There's absolutely zero trust possible.
Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.
The plan was enacted over the weekend... Only you never saw it.
Biden, his cabinet, and tons of both Dem and Republican senators and other officials were arrested. Proof of their vast crimes was shown. They were court martialed and found guilty.
However, it was decided this was too much for the American people to accept. Overturning the election and showing the crimes of these politicians could lead to Civil War.
So an agreement was reached: Biden and other deep state elements wI'll be allowed to move freely and serve their terms. President Trump would "concede" and leave office. But this is all for appearances.
Behind the scenes, Donald J. Trump is still President. This plan, known as SHADOWPREZ, was seen as a last resort. But it worked.
Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing.
It's a copypasta[1] that's been making the rounds on the internet. It's a tongue-in-cheek way of poking fun at Q supporters, not some real delusions the OP is having.
Bonus points for creativity. But since Biden has killed Keystone XL, banned fracking and unleashed the trannies onto women's sport, I doubt that The Donald still holds all the power.
It would be nice if people could trust the outcome of the election. More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.
Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
> It would be nice if people could trust the outcome of the election.
Well I don’t know, in 2017 a professor asked us if democracy was in crisis and I thought “its never been healthier”. For the first time I can remember, people were actually trying to hold the President accountable for something. Now it is true that most of that was driven by the fact that they didn’t like who the President happened to be at the time, so maybe we can get that to work in our favor again.
> More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.
Well on the one hand I agree with that, but on the other hand this is the result of some complicated interactions (no matter how you view the facts on the ground). If their distrust is actually motivated and harmful then I’m sure its not an act for those establishment types to castigate it. On the other hand such activity is sure to increase distrust. So we’re stuck again.
> Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
I agree generally
> Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
> How would anyone know they are baseless unless a proper investigation is conducted independently? What about the thousands of sworn affidavits? Surely, ALL of them can't be lying.
Proper investigations were conducted, and no serious issues found. The lawsuits were laughed out of court, even by Republican judges.
Its surely possible that all those "sworn affidavits" can be wrong in some way: AFAIK, they were either bogus, irrelevant, or from people who didn't understand what they were seeing because they hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the vote counting process before they became election observers.
The more pertinent question is: how could anyone still believe those lawsuits could have merit at this point? The sad answer is: disinformation works.
Yeah, right. And surely Rudy wasn't actually farting in court without wearing a mask. Or dripping black slime down his face beside a dildo store. Or putting his hands down his pants in a hotel room in the Borat movie.
What Giuliani was doing wasn't dissent, it wasn't a difference of opinion or anything remotely similar. It was straight up lying. Yes, defamation should be chilled.
That's exactly what this is. It's a lawsuit filed by the injured party, alleging defamation. Now a court will hear the evidence and (probably) find Giuliani guilty, because he very clearly engaged in defamation.
I'm confused; you seem to be arguing two opposite positions. You say that a civil defamation lawsuit by Dominion is suppressing dissent, and that Giuliani should be criminally prosecuted for unspecified crimes. You do realize that the latter has a much larger chilling effect, right? It's not consistent to argue against a civil case for being too chilling, and then argue for a criminal case over the same conduct.
> You say that a civil defamation lawsuit by Dominion is suppressing dissent, and that Giuliani should be criminally prosecuted for unspecified crimes
In case someone thinks this is splitting hairs, I fully support Dominion suing Giuliani for his alleged defamation. I would be somewhat horrified at the Attorney General attempting to put him in jail for it, ceteris paribus.
Lying about a company generally isn't a crime (except in restricted circumstances; there are probably scenarios where it could be a securities law issue, say), but a company is absolutely able to take a civil suit against someone who maliciously lies about it.
I realize this thread is flagged, but this reminded me of the recent situation in Thailand and the review on Tripadvisor. Thought I'd share in case you hadn't seen it.
Oh, yep, I should have caveated that as "lying about a company isn't generally a crime IN DEVELOPED DEMOCRACIES". Some countries do still have in-use criminal libel laws, and the story is different there.
Several US states have criminal libel laws that might protect a company (particularly if the company is a bank or other financial institution, which seem to be the most common to be specifically protected.)
Are there any recent (this century) examples of _successful_ criminal libel actions in the US? I would've thought it'd be fairly clearly unconstitutional.
It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days. I’d normally use a different, eight letter word to describe that.
Defamatory statements draw lawsuits. Nothing terribly new or worrying about that.
>> Dissent is only to be tolerated when it's politically convenient. Come on, man.
> It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days.
I'm not sure if you can really even call this a "classification." It's more of a false equivalency, either made in bad faith or through some sloppy bit of emotional reasoning.
I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing now (another similar example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898393). It's like some people are experiencing certain generalized feelings, then applying charged words to what triggered those feelings without understanding either the words they used or the thing they're commenting on.
> I'm not sure if you can really even call this a "classification."
Probably not, I'm mostly responding snarkily to how deeply conspiracy theories have embedded themselves into the body politic.
More important is the idea that a well formed[0] defamation lawsuit is something that requires public attention and redress. Attempting to call this defamation lawsuit something that is suppressing dissent smacks of a hamfisted attempt to make this lawsuit into something bigger than it actually is. Giuliani and his ideological cohort made a bunch of defamatory statements about a company, and predictably that company is suing for defamation. There's nothing terribly surprising or concerning about that.
0 - Defamation lawsuits can be used to suppress speech, of course. This is exactly why many states now have anti-SLAPP laws on the books. That however does not seem to be an issue in this case, as this lawsuit is at least well formed.
Dominion will argue defamation in court which will require them to prove ALL of the following: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) harm caused to Dominion.
If Dominion can prove those things to the satisfaction of a judge and jury, they should win. Our justice system is supposed to deter people from breaking the law.
And they have an extra burden: Dominion will probably be ruled to be a public figure, meaning that they will also need to prove that either Giuliani knew the statements were false or he showed "reckless disregard of the truth". But I think they should be able to do that.
It's their right to defend their reputation. If there is any proof against them let those come to light and if the machines are indeed not good let the company go belly up. But what if the allegations are lies? Shouldn't the originators of those lies take responsibility?
Pretty easy to show damages. Their employees are getting death threats. People are calling for dominion equipment to be disallowed from future elections.
I usually avoid commenting on political stuff, but my advice is to please find a better source for information than Scott Adams. He's a smart guy, but he is a strong proponent of "persuasion", i.e. changing people's minds is more valuable to him than presenting the facts accurately. This video is a classic example of his persuasion style, which is to make sloppy claims with flimsy evidence simply to make his opponents spend more time thinking about those claims. I know on HN we can do better than that.
Are you saying that I should track down and link each video of each of those individual situations that happened? And put it in a post on HN to be downvoted exactly as much as the Scott Adams video?
Pardon me for getting the exact same results for like 1/80th the amount of work.
Go ahead and dismiss all of those videos because they are in a supercut featuring Scott Adams. You do you.
I think he's saying that people here won't be "persuaded" by Scott Adams sourced information, as he is well known as a self-described purveyor of exaggerated and misleading information.
It's like linking to project veritas. If I wanted to see some highly out of context and edited video to fit a narrative there are plenty of those around and none of them are all that compelling
It's either that or find more credible evidence. Scott Adams isn't credible, period. While that doesn't make him de facto wrong on any argument, it means you cannot expect the recipients of your message to put the work in (that you've chosen not to) to validate whether this time he's operating in good faith.
You're not responding to the argument at all. Scott Adams' credibility is irrelevant. The video was shown for the segments of it depicting actual events as they happened, not for the segments featuring Adams.
It's absolutely relevant. Adams is taking snippets of videos completely out of context to try to tell a story. He's known to do this. And just watching the start of the video that's exactly what he's doing here.
Why would anyone waste their time tracking down the original videos when they already know, out of the gate, that he's taken things out of context? That's a waste of everyone's time, and EXACTLY why he's doing what he's doing. He knows most people won't bother to fact check his lies.
The correct course of action is to tell everyone what he does, and until he proves he's changed his stripes and starts acting in good faith, to ignore him.
Your original comment is flagged and I can't see it so did not watch the video.
I believe my comment is relevant to the one I replied to: I do not trust Scott Adams to present his content with any integrity at all, and so sending me a video he clipped together to make a point is not what I'd consider "good evidence". He does not act in good faith, he works backwards from a conclusion. If Steven Miller made a similar video about immigration I wouldn't trust it either without an in-depth review of the sources he relied on. I do not mean for this to be some ad hominen policy, I am not saying Adams and Miller are by default wrong because of who they are, but they don't deserve anyone's trust.
If I have missed some nuance because I couldn't watch the Adams video for myself then you have my apologies for this misunderstanding.
You didn't miss anything, it is Adams trying to prove voter fraud by taking videos out of context that have been fact checked already - but he added scary music and called the people doing their jobs "bullies" so it must be true.
To anyone else clicking this, it has been disproven repeatedly, Adams doesn't care that he's spreading lies.
Well without any details on where these clips are coming from it's impossible to know what's happening or if it's already been addressed.
A number of the clips though look like they're from the Detroit counting at the TMC Center where some Republican observers weren't allowed back in after they left because the room was at capacity because they'd been replaced by other Republican observers. At no point were there only Democratic observers or a significant imbalance, both parties had observers that weren't able to reenter!
These aren't accusations of voter (or election) fraud in the same sense as was being claimed for 2020. From your second link:
> During the tour's stop Friday in Seattle, Clinton pointed to FBI Director Christopher Wray's warning last month that Russia continues to pose a "very significant counterintelligence threat" and that efforts to influence U.S. elections with "social media, fake news" and "propaganda" has "continued pretty much unabated."
Yes she claims the election was stolen. Her words.
The Capital Hill attack was partially a result of unchecked claims from Dems and left-leaning media claiming Trump was an illegitimate President. Somehow people here think that's ok while Rudy/Trump's claims are not. Smh.
It's fine to take issue with charged language like the word "stolen", which can be interpreted in different ways; maybe you interpret that as "I won the vote count but the votes were changed", but it could also be reasonably interpreted as "I lost the vote count but I'm concerned people were influenced to vote that way through nefarious means".
I think there is a reasonable distinction between that statement and the specific claims of fraud we have been seeing for the last few months.
I think it's quite reasonable to conclude a horrible person, by his actions and statements, induced millions of people to vote a certain way. Perhaps not the way that person intended, mind you.
Unfortunately, I think the numerous tangential and unsubstantiated comments in this very thread suggest that the strategy has been highly successful. While I imagine Dominion could win against Giuliani, he is only one person and this disinformation has been spread through many channels. I expect we will see it again.
One of the things that makes this more complex is that we should be skeptical of any person, company or machine that handles election data and has the power to make any significant change to that data.
So, I think the dissenters at least got the skepticism part right. The problem, of course, is that a healthy level of skepticism should only inform the investigation of facts, and then perhaps new legislation and oversight. Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
For example, it's unfortunate that gaming machines in Las Vegas have more oversight and regulations than voting machines. That doesn't necessarily there is a problem with voting machines, but it does mean we could do more to ensure there isn't a problem with them now or in the future. Dominion has not done anything to lose my trust, but when it comes our elections, we should have proper oversight over these machines (no matter who makes them since there are multiple suppliers for voting machines).
> Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.
Actually, there were claims made about massive voter fraud in the 2016 election: When Trump could not stomach the fact that he lost the popular vote, he claimed that more than 3 million ineligible voters had voted for Clinton and that he had in fact won the popular vote.
There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.
One guy in one state asks for actual evidence such as an actual reason why fraud is being alleged and the entire investigation shrugs it's shoulders, says oh well we tried, and shuts itself down and quietly goes away? Really?
Also why pick on Padilla, why not Jon Husted (Rep, Ohio). What about all the Republican lead states where massive fraud was supposed to have happened? Trump expended no political capital or effort whatsoever on doing anything meaningful about supposed voter fraud, and couldn't even persuade any Republican state administrations he had any credible evidence or reason for alleging it. He just gave up immediately at the first hurdle of being asked what he wanted to do and why. In fact he didn't even pursue this personally, he just delegated it to some flunkies and walked away from the issue until the next election.
How to explain this? It's almost as if he had no credible reason for making the claims and the whole thing was just for show.
Sure, and if Trump and his goons were actually worried about issues with Dominion machines they should have filed lawsuits in every county that used the machines... it doesn’t take a genius to realize Trump et al only filed ridiculously vague complaints where he lost the vote as an insane last-ditch effort to somehow overturn his overwhelming loss and/or rile up his supporters.
Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.
> Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.
For the same reason it's (probably) baseless for a coworker of yours to claim you've been embezzling millions from your employer for years. It's basically a false accusation.
>Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns?
It's not baseless to claim voter fraud when you have proof. It's baseless when you claim voter fraud without any actual proof.
>If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.
It sounds like he expects the President of the United States to act with the integrity the office commands. Not ask/condone/allow his lawyer to lie on television (where he can make up any lie he wants) while admitting there was no fraud in court (where he's actually held legally accountable for his statements).
The Mueller report clearly stated that Russia had active efforts to influence the 2016 election, the Trump campaign was aware of those efforts, and the Trump campaign expected to benefit from those efforts.
Are you claiming that you're more informed than Robert Mueller?
The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side. There have been plenty of good reasons to suspect electronic voting in the past, at least in the absence of verifiable paper backups and regular random sampling recounts of those paper ballots. Which is still a pretty rare practice, isn't it? In the absence of those standards, it's still reasonable to have suspicion even if you don't have evidence; the entire problem is that you're kept from gathering the evidence.
The biggest reason to doubt the "voter fraud" theories this time around is because of who is making the complaints, not because the voting companies (or the laws surrounding e-voting) are beyond reproach.
More to the point - if there is actual voter fraud at some point it will need to announced, communicated and investigated. Electronic voting systems can be used to remove humans from the loop and that has real potential to undermine the election system.
There needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them. Ordinary standards of transparency are not enough, for example.
> the entire problem is that you're kept from gathering the evidence.
Well, there's also the fact that the folks advancing these theories are insisting that they're being "kept from gathering the evidence", when in reality much of what they're saying is contradicted by evidence.
For example, the instances cited in the lawsuit where Giuliani and others continued to insist that Dominion voting machines had changed the Georgia election outcome by flipping votes, even after the original results had been confirmed by a full hand recount.
Too many arguments boil down to people, and motives, not facts. It is a bad idea to put the short term desire to see a foe vanquished over the long term cost of bad laws and policy.
Laws are not perfect, and I'm not convinced we want the basis of democracy to be closed source voting machines, or that even if we do, the checks and balances as they stand are currently 100% correct.
Well sure, if we're going to conflate arguments in good faith with arguments in bad faith, we won't really get anywhere... the point is that without doing manual recounts it's hard to gather evidence of possible flaws in an electronic count, and you can't always count on the recount happening. In contrast, Georgia's recount did happen, so they were able to gather evidence, and didn't find any... so yes, of course that's a different thing entirely.
But that's the thing about Dominion -- their machines do generate a paper trail, and this paper trail was audited. One of the big pushes to secure this election compared to previous ones was to use as many voting machines with auditable paper trails as possible.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.
Since I voted in Georgia on these machines, the process is the following:
- get ID validated & ability to vote
- get an initialized smart card
- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff
- submit, get printout from printer
- scan printout into a machine
- return smart card
At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.
The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.
So you take the printout from one machine and insert it into another to be scanned? I agree that would satisfy auditability, since you can look at the printout and make sure it's correct.
In Ohio, we used the same Dominion voting systems with the same process:
Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.
The most common government-issued ID is a driver's license, to the point that it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license. So anyone who can't drive has an uphill battle--predominantly blind people, as well as poor people who live in the inner city where car ownership is infeasibly expensive. Another commonish case is tribal reservations, where tribal documentation is usually sufficient, but the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote.
The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.
I wonder why the interested parties don't just offer to pay for ID cards. Seems like this would solve both problems, but perhaps I'm missing something obvious.
> it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license
As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.
If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.
> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote
The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.
I don't know which company makes them, but the machines at my polling site in Washington DC are like this. You fill in your ballot on the machine, which has clear visual feedback as you go along and helps with procedural things like "pick up to 2".
When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.
It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)
Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.
A very similar process in Tennessee. I'm not sure if the machine was made by Dominion, but I had a chance to review the printout before scanning. The printout appeared to pass through the scanner and into a locked container beneath, presumably for actual paper audits.
For mail-in ballots, a hand-filled ballot is scanned, and if there's a discrepancy it gets corrected then re-printed by an official in a process called adjudication. This is supposed to be done in front of an observer from both parties so security checks like signature matching can be performed, which was not done as evidenced in the Fulton county video footage.
Mail-in voting creates the opportunity for mass manufacturing ballots as well as hijacking ballot adjudication processes, especially if you block bipartisan observation to circumvent security checks put in place specifically to mitigate these types of fraud.
And "hand recounts" would not uncover these issues. [1]
You don't need "widespread" fraud to overturn an election. Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
Why are you talking about mail-in ballots in a thread about Dominion Voting Systems?
Mail-in ballots work the same way they have since 1864. You fill out a paper ballot and mail it back.
> Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
16% of counties - when more than half the US population lives in just 4.6% of the counties. Remember that many counties are nearly empty and have few voters. Due to the rural/urban political divide, sparsely populated rural counties typically vote for the GOP in recent elections while densely populated suburbs and cities lean more towards the Democrats.
Biden’s numbers in general were similar to Hillary’s in 2016, but he gained ground in the suburbs due to white educated voters fleeing from Trump after the last 4 years. There is no indication that a “few key counties” were targeted - the shift was seen in all 50 states. Compare Texas suburban county votes in 2016 to 2020.
The machine count of mail-in ballots is checked by a hand count audit. For instance, in Georgia every ballot was recounted by humans to confirm the accuracy of the machine count.
The hand count didn't address any of the risks people were actually worried about. It could not have caught either of the types of fraud I mentioned above, for example.
Read the interview I posted with Philip Stark, Berkeley Math Dean who is probably the leading expert on election auditing having designed the procedures for conducting risk-limiting audits in many states. He explains this in detail.
Debating with the left on this is like debating with a brick wall. You try to have a logical conversation about the basic security aspects involved here and they respond by calling you a conspiracy theorist and change the underlying subject.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Creating accounts to do that with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
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So scanning machines, the same ones we’ve used for decades, are compromised too? And that doesn’t show up in any of the routine audits that happen in a lot of states after an election?
What would you have people do? Maybe have the volunteers just scan the ballot by hand and then write down on paper the vote totals?
The argument just boils down to “machines are scary to me” and that isn’t a good enough reason to abandon progress that is routinely shown to work just fine.
Conversely, hand filled out ballots are a mess, often illegible, the hanging chad fiasco, etc. With electronic voting, the voter can (should?) see on a screen exactly what they did, and the machine can make multiple exact copies in electronic and paper formats of that exact result. There is far less ambiguity in the physical record once this has been done.
I agree that if the electronic voting machine is just helping you print out an easily legible copy of your ballot, which you then verify for correctness and take to another machine to have it scanned for counting, that's a good thing, for the reasons you give. Not only does it help with auditability since the physical record is more standardized, it also probably reduces the error rate of automated counting.
What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.
It is the way it is done for all Dominion voting machines, which replaced Diebold AccuVote machines (which did not leave a paper trail) in Georgia in 2019.
The UK has paper-only ballots and none of this stuff is a problem. (There are no "hanging chads" because ballots are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper). The polls close at 10pm, the votes are counted overnight by volunteers, and the winner takes office the next morning. It always baffles me that the US system is so complicated.
You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?
The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
Canadian here, and yes, it's basically impossible to mark your ballot wrong for a commonwealth parliamentary election for the simple reason you only vote for a single thing: who should be member of parliament for your riding.
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
> You're telling me out of millions of ballots, none of the pen or pencil markings could be unclear?
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
It's definitely unnecessarily complicated, and the hanging chad problem simply stems from elections where making such a claim can win the whole election for your candidate.
There are not literal hanging chads but you can still have problems, such as marks in multiple boxes when only one choice is permitted, or marks outside the designated boxes.
I've participated as ballot counter in provincial elections (British Columbia) where an 'X' or check mark were valid ways to make a choice on a ballot. It was a very long time ago however my recollection was that the mark was to be on or in the box beside the candidate name. Ballots were excluded but they were exceedingly rare and always in consultation with supervisors. (completely missed the box)
I did it for municipal elections in Quebec (which follows the provincial rules) and the big important thing to note is that people voted for two things, mayor and councillor, and received two separate ballots on different papers.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
Here's the UK rules on spoilt ballots [1]. Here's [2] an article showing that such removed ballots sometimes get a larger share than a candidate, and that the rate is larger than the close state elections the US just had. Here's [3] some UK elections where 2.9% of all ballots were discarded because they were filled out wrong.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
All of those spoilt ballot examples are where the proportion of spoiled ballots is high because voters are protesting. They don’t combat the claim that inadvertently spoiled ballots are rare, nor that spoiled ballots open to the possibility of fraud.
So you're claiming that the Florida study doesn't measure spoilt ballots by technology, despite them specifically stating how they normalized for errors? You're basically calling them liars. Have a citation showing your evidence to make such a claim?
My apologies regarding the Florida study; I only intended to address the references you had to UK ballots, given the context of this thread.
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
The trick is that American ballots bombard their voters with dozens of questions and dozens of options. Judges, ballot initiatives, various functionaries, etc, which makes hand counted paper ballots impractical.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
> In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
The extra items in the US are virtually always at the state and local level, where quite often state constitutions or local laws require certain items, such as bond issues to fund development, to be voted on directly. I personally don't have a problem with this, but then I think the powers of governments in general, at all levels, should be much more limited than they currently are.
The solution to this (also one which is used in the UK) is to put these other votes on different pieces of paper. That way you can count the presidential election first and leave the local initiatives to a bit later, or however you'd prefer to prioritize the results.
Its kinda hard not to see how you voted at least around here. It is printed off in fairly large print on the paper ballot which is then taken to a separate machine to actually tally the votes. (No clue as to the brand used though. At a ~65% trump vote my vote was worthless anyways though so why pay attention to the machines.)
The electronic voting machines I use in Southern California actually print my selections on a piece of paper that I can look at under a little piece of plastic. I approve that it shows my votes accurately and then the paper slides away. Presumably kept with the machine so an audit could be done.
That doesn't seem much different than saying that a traditional hand-filled ballot doesn't leave a useful paper trail because there's no evidence that the voter placed the pen markings where they intended to place them. Which, in fact, is an argument that's been made before with hand-filled ballots.
> a traditional hand-filled ballot doesn't leave a useful paper trail because there's no evidence that the voter placed the pen markings where they intended to place them
But that's on me, the voter; it's up to me to check that my ballot reflects my intent before I submit it to be counted. If I make a mistake, I can always ask for a new ballot. So the paper ballot reflects what I, the voter, submitted to be counted, and that's the best that could possibly be done as far as an audit trail is concerned.
>unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism
If the voter can easily see that the ballot reflects their choices, then it's not useless as an auditing mechanism. That's hyperbole.
Remember, if there is massive/systematic fraud going on, then every instance doesn't have to be caught to uncover it.
The adjudication process is where things get dicey though, if the machine seems a ballot unreadable it defers to the machine operator to tell it which candidate was selected, and this accuracy is a configurable threshold.
These machines create an auditable paper trail, replacing a system that did not in Georgia. The conspiracy theorists claimed that the electronic votes were modified in Venezuela. The validation of the paper ballots showed that this had not happened.
> The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side.
That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.
Voting is a system that needs to be simple, transparent, and auditable. The technical solutions are 0/3 and an example of “over engineering” leading to a poor quality solution.
Our current voting system is well below international standards — and it’s because of the technology.
First off, like all the other comments have said already, the systems in question were auditable. They printed out a paper receipt and they verified those by a hand-count.
Second, considering who we're dealing with, it fundamentally doesn't matter. They aren't actually arguing for more secure elections, they're looking for any reason to throw out the results because they lost. If systems were up to "international standards" (I don't know what those are, can you be more specific?) they'll just say they're "liberal commie standards that you can't trust, and we need American standards" or some nonsense like that.
By all means have more secure elections. Just know that it won't do anything in a scenario where the loser claims any result other than their victory is "rigged".
Those things in the past helped push for paper receipts. In every contested state there were paper receipts this time. We should expand that to everywhere that uses electronic voting, but we don't have to lie about irregularities to do it.
> the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626
Ironically, a previous version of this company known as Diebold was used in the 2004 election, and Democrats claimed the electronic voting machines were used to commit voter fraud. Apparently, one could open up the vote ledger in MS Access and modify the votes without any kind of audit trail or password. Hopefully after the multiple rebrandings Dominion has gotten its security under better control :D
You clearly lack a fundamental understanding of the issues involved here... The voting process used by the Dominion machines involves a physical paper trail that is verified by the voter. Random sampling is done routinely comparing the electronically tabulated results against the paper audit log.
In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.
Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes.
Do you know where the Dominion validation process is clearly documented so it is easy to see whether it is easily subverted? I will bet the answer is no, and the software and hardware are all trade secrets and impossible for voters to verify :D. Sounds like a totally trustworthy system to me.
It is not "Dominion's" process, it is the local board of election's process. All Dominion supplies are fancy printers and optical scanners.
The verification process in Georgia involved physically counting all of the paper ballots. The Dominion machines were totally uninvolved in the hand-recount (and, unsurprisingly, the hand-recount found that the original machine tally was extremely accurate)
Again, I think it's pretty clear you don't understand what role the machines actually play in the voting process.
Perhaps what you say is correct, but I have no way to verify the vote records myself. All I can do is trust the vote counters, and at this point that is the very matter under dispute. Someone in the know really should do an in depth write-up of why it is we can trust this election result. As it is the third Peter Navarro report appears very suspicious and it is hard to believe there is absolutely no reason to doubt the election results. On the contrary the election could very well have been the steal of the century.
This is very "conspiracy theory" type thinking you're engaging in... There is no evidence supporting any of the claims of fraud, any evidence that doesn't support your position is automatically dismissed as untrustworthy.
Your claim seems to be that the Georgia Secretary of State (a staunch Republican and Trump supporter) along with the governor managed to pull off a huge operation to secretly change the results of the election (which would have involved hundreds of people and require that none of them speak out). That's a really outlandish claim, and requires supporting evidence, of which you have none.
I would prefer not to believe the election was stolen. I wanted Trump out, and Biden seems a reasonable replacement. I also debunked a number of the fallacious statistical 'proofs' the election was stolen. Believe me I would like nothing better than to believe everything is fine. But especially Navarro's report makes me unable to dismiss the allegations off hand with a clean conscience. I've also looked into the PA court's reasons for dismissing Trump's lawsuit from back in Sept, and the reasoning is all based on technicalities and does not address the substance of the concern that the loosening of the rules has opened the door to major fraud. The fact all the coverage of the lawsuits is frivolous dismissal or even in some cases the courts rule in favor does nothing to set my mind at ease.
Peter Navarro is a _highly_ partisan source, and not someone you should assume to be arguing in good faith.
Are there other, more credible, sources that are influencing your thinking? There is zero evidence supporting the claim of widespread fraud. Unless you have some evidence of some kind, it really seems like you would prefer to believe there is some vast conspiracy and you are writing off all the evidence to the contrary.
I am looking at the lawsuits and articles linked from Navarro's report. The lawsuits sound pretty credible to me. When I read the court's reason for rejecting the lawsuit it sounds like the judge is looking for technical reasons to reject the lawsuit.
When I look for articles explaining why the lawsuits are rejected en mass, every article I have found is very hand wavy, stating the judges are appointed by Trump so we should expect them to be unbiased. However, no one actually dogs into the opinions or takes the reason why the election seems highly suspicious seriously.
To pick out one specific piece of evidence, in PA they found 200k more votes than voters, which is more than enough to change the result for that state. The counts are all from state government databases.
Navarro has over 50 such claims linked in his report, totalling over 3M potentially fraudulent votes. Regardless of what you think of the man, the evidence itself I find hard to set aside, even though I am like you and would tend towards dismissing Navarro as a partisan hack. But when he has laid out the claimed evidence like this in detail I must at least give it a spot check and the spot checks hold up so far.
Ok... but the 200k thing is easily debunked... The SURE system is not the official record of votes, the certified county results are. It is not unexpected that those wouldn't match (the counties were prioritizing getting the elections certified and hadn't yet published their results to SURE (which, again, isn't the official source of truth, and therefore wasn't a priority). Several large counties had not uploaded their data to SURE, as of the time of the press release you linked to.
You claim that the "spot checks hold up", but the one example you chose to cite (presumably one of the ones you believe holds up) falls apart with just a tiny bit of research.
Very interesting. Do you know of a way I can confirm this discrepancy is resolved? I can find registered voter counts and votes tallied, but not votes cast counts.
> Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes.
Incorrect. Voter rolls have information about who voted, and this information is public record. You can simply call up a random sample of recorded 2020 voters in Georgia and ask them to confirm that they voted in the election.
There is no way to undetectably insert additional fake paper ballots (“vote dumps”) unless you are alleging a vast conspiracy that removed the real paper ballots from storage after the election and replaced them with new fake ones, without any whistleblowers on the (Republican-run and Trump-supporting) elections staff speaking out.
Are the specific votes public record? If not, it is impossible to verify votes were recorded correctly. But the addresses being public record is interesting. If that information is public record then it would be easy for citizens to randomly verify enough records to ascertain whether enough votes were dumped to make a difference. If what you say is correct then I can try verifying it myself. Why has no one publicly done this? Would be an easy way to put the matter to rest.
UPDATE: I just checked the GA website, and all it gives me is voter IDs and whom they voted for. No way I can verify vote fraud did not occur from that information. No addresses or names.
> How exactly is the possibility of vote dumping and vote
flipping eliminated?
You cannot simply add ballots to the election as the totals would then be incorrect. (There would be more votes than people recorded as voting)
What is “Vote Dumping”? Do you mean inserting fraudulent paper ballots into the stored ballots to be counted?
The election was recorded on physical paper ballots. Are you alleging a vast conspiracy of bipartisan election workers and Republican Secretary of State monitors to replace the legitimate physical ballots with fake ones?
All ballots were hand counted and the initial Dominion machine count was confirmed accurate, so the allegation would be a conspiracy where Dominion scanners inaccurately counted the original paper ballots, then the paper ballots were secretly replaced with fakes to match the inaccurate Dominion counts? And this would have had to been done state-wide without a single whistleblower. It’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory if you try to write it out.
An election theft is conspiracy by definition. The question is whether the conspiracy is feasible. But it is feasible if only a few counties or cities committed fraud. What makes conspiracy infeasible is widespread collusion without a mechanism of coordination and ensuring secrecy. Collusion in a few large municipalities does not seem obviously out of the question.
Either a single actor with appropriate access or multiple independent actors not acting in coordination could effect the theft of an election without any conspiracy.
Conspiracy requires an agreement to work together; that might help with an election theft but it is not “by definition” necessary for election theft.
> UPDATE: I just checked the GA website, and all it gives me is voter IDs and whom they voted for. No way I can verify vote fraud did not occur from that information. No addresses or names.
I would suggest that if you weren’t able to find this information using google, you should think about what that means for your research skills and the skills/knowledge of those who create and propagate the voter fraud lies. Some humility might be in order as to why experts don’t think there was fraud, but others who don’t understand how elections work do....
“ You will need a voter file in order to associate a voter with his or her voter history. The voter and history files both contain the voter registration number and can be linked on this field.
For more information on voter lists, please send an email to AJackson@sos.ga.gov with the subject “Voter List Files.””
“ So is it true your neighbors or friends can find out if you voted? 11Alive verified with the Secretary of State’s website that under Georgia law, “voter registration lists are available to the public and contain the following information: voter name, residential address, mailing address if different, race, gender, registration date, and last voting date.”
The information is available by order for a fee on the Secretary of State’s Office website, though is not to be used for commercial purposes.”
Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit.
Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
Sure, but this exception proves the point. There are indeed electronic voting machines widely considered to be suspect. So the notion that electronic voting machines could potentially be used to commit fraud in this election is not out of the question.
You were specifically trying to cast doubt on Dominion. And now that your statement has been outed as false, you're moving the goalposts to "voting machines in general".
No, Dominion purchased these questionable voting machines, so they clearly possess questionable voting machines. So my major claim that Dominion possesses questionable voting machines is substantiated. In fact ES&S equipment is used by Georgia.
Well, the question remains then. Definitely they are not beyond question. There is a traceable lineage of questionable machines leading right up to the region where vote fraud allegations through electronic vote machines. Enough that a decent look by a disinterested party is warranted.
Shutting people up is going to do the opposite. We need to debunk their claims piece by piece to convince the people that are somehow convinced by the evidence
You'd be surprised how few people are interested in evidence these days. More often than not, your Reuters/AP source will be shoved aside in favor of some page along the lines of reallycoolnews.blogspot.com.
We've already seen this happen–when YouTube started putting labels on all COVID-19-related content, deniers were unsatisfied by the sources presented because they have been indoctrinated to believe nothing mainstream can be trusted.
It'd be like trying to talk to a 9/11-truther or a flat-earther, they'll have a refutation ready for all of your evidence, or they'll convince themselves your cited sources are part of the conspiracy..
They'll use any excuse to delude themselves that they're correct, because to admit otherwise is to admit that they were dumb enough to have been conned by a terrible conman. When they saw the morons attacking congress, they convinced themselves "people wearing helmets are Antifa, and all the attackers are Antifa plants...".
Why would you want to do that? Voter fraud happens regularly. Probably not to the extent that the election flips but I see no issue with asking fraud claims to be looked into. There 0 good excuse to completely ignore fraud claims. IF you really want confidence in our system all claims of abuse should be taken seriously. Tossing them out and acting like fraud never happens is every bit as ridiculous as claiming the election was rife with it. The only way to determine they're "baseless" is to actually investigate them.
The best overview of this mess is from Cory Doctorow, who notes that while the claims of fraud in this election are garbage, the voting machines, and especially overused Ballot-marking devices (BMDs), are also hugely problematic.
And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody.
The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/
Wills, marriage certificates, birth certificates, etc etc. All replaceable sure, however you almost never need to use them and if your home burns down you're going to hate that extra pain in the ass after the fact.
I'm sure I could avoid using one, for instance getting a fire safe. However since the bank offers it for free, why not use it?
Also, you have the option of offsite storage for any media backups. There is always the "Cloud" however sometimes it's nice to know your wedding photos are in a secure location.
> Honestly, who uses a safe deposit box these days? And what would one use it for?
Offsite storage of small, highly value items. Important documents especially (e.g.,.duplicate official copies of birth certificates and similar documents as offsite backup, because getting them from the source can be time consuming, and present chicken and egg problems.)
They might be referring to the American division. From a quick glance, it seems like there isn't much in common between the two, including the perks you mentioned (e.g. the minimum checking balance only waives the checking account fee, but doesn't waive a premium credit card fee, provide a safety deposit box, etc).
before donald trump was ever in office, i always believed that these voting machines are complete bullshit. our entire voting system is bullshit. and it would be easy to fix. these machines have been shown to be massively flawed and vulnerable to hacking/tinkering. again, this was my opinion before donald trump was elected.
Voter machines being unreliable has seemed to be the prevailing opinion in hacker news and similar circles until now. Are they suddenly all okay because Giuliani has spread bs about them?
Voting machines without a paper trail have been deemed unreliable, and still should be deemed unreliable. These machines are used to generate an authoritative paper ballot, which is exactly what critics have demanded.
A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.
I don't see the point of a voting machine with a paper trail. You get preliminary statistics a bit faster and you get people used to the idea of voting machines.
If someone is going to manipulate the results, they now have to change both the paper results and the electronic results instead of just one or the other.
Then I suppose it's a good thing you aren't making decisions about voting machines!
Instead of thinking of them as "voting machines with a paper trail," think of them as "reliable, trustworthy paper ballots that are made clean and uniform using a machine."
The point is that the output is a paper ballot which can be (and often is) hand-counted for auditing and verification purposes. Paper ballots rule.
Maybe you misunderstood me. I meant that paper votes are superior so why bother complicating the process with machines. It gives reasons to not trust or understand the process. Most democracies work fine without voting machines.
In 2000, Florida gave us just one of many examples of how paper ballots alone are not always reliable. As I said in my previous comment, the machines are used to provide clean, uniform ballots. They also would speed up counts considerably if not for people deliberately sowing distrust of the machines.
You also get final results much faster in most cases.
Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.
This is called a risk-limiting audit.
If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.
In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.
If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.
Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.
Still, i fell that machines make it needlessly complex. Most democracies do fine without that. Getting a fast result seems like the least important aspect of voting for representatives.
I was a heavy Slashdot user before the takeover, and now Hacker News fills the hole in my browsing that Slashdot left. If you're like me, you'll remember the many articles about the vulnerability of Diebold voting machines. This has always been a concern, since at least the early '00s or before. I guess people have a very selective amnesia.
The original Diebold machines, at least, were purely electronic; they did not leave an auditable paper trail like the Dominion machines do. So we've fortunately learned a lot in the intervening decades and have fixed the glaring security flaws.
How would the machine predict which voters to deceive? I reviewed my printed ballot before submitting it. I'd guess it is probably more than "practically none". If 0.1% of voters did this, it would be 159633 ballots reviewed. If the tainted machines consistently changed these ballots to the same presidential candidate, ~80,000 voters would have had an opportunity to detect a dishonest voting machine. What ratio of votes would need to change in order to change the outcome? And what ratio would the bad actors predict was necessary in advance of the election?
But regardless of the above -- the design change to include printed ballots was a big improvement in security and voter confidence in the election.
Probably everyone. I voted on a Dominion machine this year. It prints out a full size piece of paper on thick stock with big font saying who you're voting for. You then have to carry that piece of paper to the ballot counting machine and stand in line for a minute before it's your turn to put your vote in the counter. The piece of paper isn't a receipt, it's your actual ballot. In the case of the elections this year, all of those were manually hand counted as well as being electronically counted and the counts were identical.
Did you notice if the ballot had a QR code on it? Did you scan the QR code, decipher its data structure and verify it matches your voting intent?
Because according to what I saw presented in hearings, the reading machines actually read the QR code made by ballot-marking-device, not the human readable portion of the ballot.
If true, that seems an obvious design flaw (to be nice) right there.
I am not an expert but what I've read is that in the Dominion system, when a Ballot Marking Device is used, it generates a QR code representing the vote in addition to the human readable ballot. Next, the ballot reader machine reads the QR code, not the human readable portion.
Assuming this is true, it would be simple to modify the printing software such that the QR code vote is different from the human readable vote.
A recount, by running the paper ballots through the machine again, would come up with the same result as the first time.
The only way to catch it would be to hand-count the paper ballots and compare the results to the machine counted votes.
Really though, the QR code should be eliminated, so that the voter is able to personally verify what the machine will actually read.
Exactly: it gets caught when doing a hand recount. A hand recount was done in Georgia this year, for example. There were no issues. The conspiracy theories were successfully disproven.
Dominion voting machines use human-readable printed ballots as a backup auditing mechanism. In all of the disputed states these paper ballots were hand counted (sometimes multiple times) and the original electronically reported results were confirmed.
So how are these voting machines complete bullshit exactly? What do you think the mechanism of attack is, and do you have any sources other than just your speculation?
Why must everything involve the computer? It was on paper when I was a kid, didn't require an army of six-figure salaries, and things seemed to go far more smoothly.
And it's still on paper, just now with some electronic augmentation that makes vote counting instant and lowers the error rate.
Do you not remember how problematic the purely paper voting systems were? How many errors were made in the voting and the counts and how long it took to get the final results in close elections? Florida 2000 is a famous, widely-known example. The computers are clearly better.
So, the people who can't get hole-punching and ballot layout right are going to "fix" things with two programming languages, three databases, and a dozen or so support libraries?
Also, Florida 2000 is a strange example, considering the present drama. We've only gone from a simple controversy to a more complex one.
Per Bruce Schneier:
> If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems, and you don't understand the technology.
If I give you $100 to put in my bank account, and you print off your own receipt that my $100 made it into the account, what exactly does that prove?
Now let's pretend you don't even give me that receipt, but you just keep it for your own accounting. I later find my $100 isn't in my account. But hey, you have a receipt you printed that says you put it in my account.
If you're honest, this system works. If I can't trust you, then the receipt is meaningless.
In Floyd county more than 2,000 votes switched sides out of roughly 40,000 votes. So it now has a real world demonstrated error rate of 0.5% which is not insignificant.
For example, I would not trust a calculator with a 0.5% error to do my taxes. I wouldn't even us it on an exam.
No votes switched sides. Missing votes were added to both sides because of missing memory cards, or because:
> Floyd County officials discovered about 2,400 ballots that election workers neglected to rescan after a scanner failed and results could not be retrieved from memory cards. Officials attributed the error to “gross incompetence” on the part of the county’s elections director.
The good news is election security researchers mostly agree with you.
The prevailing opinion of election security professionals is that State election systems should be designed assuming the machines are insecure and the process should be tolerant to that fault.
That's why many states that use electronic voting or tabulation produce a voter verifiable paper trail. That means, when you're done voting the machine gives the voter a piece of paper that has their votes on it. The voter can check the paper to ensure it matches their votes, then deposits the paper record like a ballot.
State's can then use Risk Limiting Audits to verify a necessary amount of randomly sampled ballots to ensure that the electronic count matches the voter verifiable paper ballots.
So, if your concern is that the GA election was overturned by electronic tampering you would need to explain why the voter verifiable paper trail extremely closely matched the electronic tabulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I agree with you. There are some states that use electronic voting or tabulation without a voter-verifiable paper trail and risk limiting audits. Fortunately, none of those states were "disputed" in this election. But those states should absolutely switch to these kinds of systems.
The attack vector isn’t the tabulation, it’s the mail-in ballot sleeves.
The identity of the voter is on the outer envelope which is separated from the ballot and destroyed after their signature is checked. An attacker could insert manufactured ballots to be tabulated after this process and there would be no way to know if they are legitimate or not - they’re anonymous now too so you can’t check with the voter and the voter can’t verify their vote.
You can recount the ballots all you want if this attack occurred, because the fake and real ballots would be indistinguishable and unauditable.
There are proposals on how to make the system more secure to this attack without eliminating anonymity. However I believe they would all eliminate same day registration.
You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough.
Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample.
In fact, you're right that a _very_ narrow margin requires a random sample that ends up being very nearly or actually all votes.
Georgia is a perfect example of this. Georgia applied a Risk Limiting Audit to the Presidential Election. Because the margin was so close, the RLA required them to sample every single ballot cast. The first "complete hand recount" of Georgia was actually a Risk Limiting Audit.
Something that struck me about the Arizona hand recount numbers: most of the reporting precincts(? - I use this term in a general sense, I don't remember how the numbers were grouped) reported that hand counts in batches of about 1000 votes showed an accuracy of about 99%, i.e., on the order of 5-10 ballots incorrectly counted (again, rough numbers from memory). But then some of the precincts reported "nope, we found 100% accuracy; no discrepancies", for the same batch sizes. That struck me as odd. There wasn't a spectrum where 0-10 or even 0-20 were the outliers; it was bimodal around 5-10 and 0. Or whatever the actual numbers were, my point is bimodality with a mode at 0. That was odd.
Random sampling is always able to prove as accurately as you wish that something is true. Increase the sample size as needed.
Georgia was the closest percentagewise in 2020. 4935487 votes were cast between Trump and Biden, and the difference was 11779 votes. However, even if Georgia went to Trump, Biden still wins, so you're forced to check states with even larger gaps.
However, even in Georgia, to claim the election should have gone the other way with 99% certainty, it is not hard to check wherever you want. This was done by many groups, for example here [1]. Of course, given the sheer idiocy of Trump followers and news support, they don't educate their supporters on any of this, because the facts destroy their claims.
Since voter records are public in pretty much every state (every one I've looked at over the past few elections let you download them), it's trivial for researchers to do this sampling. They do this every election, and that is how they make the statements they do about the extremely low rates of fraud - they did do the testing.
Trump and co did it too, and found nothing. They had the lists immediately, because they started publishing names they claimed were fraudulent, and in each case the media showed them wrong. So they were looking at the names.
And even with those names, and the ability to sample, they still didn't put forth any solid evidence. Sampling irregularities would have been enough to get more eyes looking. But they knew (just like Trump knew in 2016 with his Clinton 3M illegal votes charade that he eventually dropped) that this is a lie.
>> these machines have been shown to be massively flawed
That statement goes against everything I've read about voting in the U.S.A. However, I don't think I have actually read everything. What did you read? Is there a link that I can follow?
It was never heard in court. I think that's what people are upset about. If they felt it had its day in court, they would feel differently. Instead, they have the media patting their heads explaining that "it's all fine." Fraud didn't have to be proven; it simply had to be shown to have been possible. The question is whether protections were breached that keep fraud from not being possible.
Listen, I'm a "Bernie Sanders" Progressive. I didn't vote because both candidates were too conservative for me. I don't really have a horse in this race.
That said, this clip shows that the US didn't take its electoral systems seriously. Georgia hasn't applied a security patch since 2012? Really? And you and the entire media are telling me that it wasn't possible when this clip is pretty clear that it wasn't just possible but fairly easy.
It reminds me of when a blockbuster film comes out and it's a stinker, but a lot of money was dropped on it. So there's an effort to make up the opening weekend by having the media sing its praises. "'Cats' is an amazing film!" But it doesn't work. Your strategy isn't working and won't work. The only way forward is to let it have its day in court.
The courts were never given anything to hear. They can’t just go to trial on hearsay, innuendo, or wild speculation. You have evidence or you don’t, this isn’t like a court room drama where they decide to go to trial first and see the evidence later.
Oh, hey Sean! I'd rather talk to you about future of programming than this junk, but OK.
You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like either of them! :-)
It's like a clean room. You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted. There's enough evidence to show that with the existing video and hundreds of witnesses.
The clip I linked to shows that our electoral systems are a train wreck in many states, especially when compared to other countries. (Go watch it.) Now we're screwed. Tens of millions of Americans feel (pretty validly) cheated out of their vote and it has created a no-win situation.
I hate this topic. What are you working on? Any new insights? :-)
States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally.
> You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted.
That is not how law works in the USA or any country that I'm aware of. You have to prove that wrong doing occurred, not prove that wrong doing did not occur. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the defendant. Science works the same way (something is a theory if it can't be disproven, not if it can be proven that it can't be disproven).
> They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures.
State Constitution changes are often controlled by the people, ultimately, not the legislature, which has occasionally been used in Presidential election cases to argue that such State Constitutions cannot constrain regulation of state elections because they are not under the exclusive control of the legislature. The federal courts have, IIRC, consistently and emphatically rejected this logic, though.
> So if I run in with a thousand ballots and shuffle them in with existing ballots, unless you can prove that I changed the outcome, that's fine?
A crime is a crime regardless of whether it effects the outcome. It is fairly straightforward to prove that you stuffed a thousand ballets if you actually did that, we just have to show evidence of what you did! It is impossible to prove that you or someone else didn't stuff ballots, because it is logically a possible that it occurred. IE proving existence is something that is possible, proving non-existence is something that is impossible.
> I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
I'm saying that there is simply no evidence of wrong doing so the courts have nothing to act on. We haven't even made it to the "should the wrong doing invalidate the electoral process" yet.
This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.
The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.
And if Trump had won, I suspect most of these comments would be critical of the absolutely sub-par security of our voting infrastructure.
But tribalism still rules, so lots of praise abounds about how well things went. Mostly because their opponent lost.
Frankly, we need publicly auditable records. For some reason we can request practically any non-classified data from the government... but not fine grained, anonymous voting data.
That nobody seems to think this is a problem is... well, not shocking. But when the party that Hacker News largely opposes wins in the future, I bet (hope) there will be calls to improve our infrastructure.
For a bunch of people who raise hell about the dangers of using SMS for 2FA, I'm a little surprised at the cavalier dismissal of serious institutional and technological shortcomings in one of the most mission critical systems in the world.
I think maybe that's psychological bias at play and not, say, actual affirmation that the system is resilient, let alone adequate. The number of downvotes I've gotten without a single reply is quite suggestive of this.
Seriously disappointed in this community of some of the most enlightened technical and scientific minds in the world, right now...
I had that view for the older direct recording systems with no paper trail.
But these seem to record on each machine for a quick count the night of, but then also produce a paper ballot for an audit. Much better. It would be even better if the paper ballot was easy for the voter to quickly validate.
But as long as the machine is really just helping you mark a paper ballot, and it's the paper ballot that is "official" end the end, it seems much safer.
Except I've seen witnesses testify that on at least some systems, there is a non human readable QR code generated by the ballot-marking-device and it is the QR code that is actually read.
I argue the concept. In my view using comedy to make fun of supposedly intellectually inferior people is despicable. We have a very similar show in Germany called "Tagesshow". Both are claiming a moral high ground while ridiculing political opponents.
The Dominion machines address the issues from that video. In particular, the machine that the voter makes their choice on prints out a paper ballot marked with that choice, which the voter then turns in to be counted on a different machine.
The paper ballots can then be used for risk limiting hand audit afterwards to verify that the machine count was accurate, or in the case of a close race a full hand recount.
Unfortunately this is not a good thing for Dominion in the long term. The cult made up lies and successfully convinced a large population its real and the whole party brass is in on the scam. However this is a terrible situation for Dominion.
They are forced to sue to prove they are not in the wrong, however that will spun as choosing sides and they could be kicked out when the contract ends. For the cult, this company and the service they provide is just another cog that should be controlled and they will try to get some enabler in there.
Yeah, isn't the reason they are suing that the lawsuits have caused long-term damage... not sure what the above poster was getting at with their comment.
I remember a lot of accusation about Diebold voting back in the 2000s, and concerns about lack of auditability. My understanding is that newer systems now let you vote at a machine, but it spits out a receipt that the voter can verify and the county can hold on to for the sake of audits and recounts. Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
My understanding is that newer systems now let you vote at a machine, but it spits out a receipt that the county can hold on to for the sake of audits and recounts.
Not new. I've had paper voting receipts for at least 15 years. Probably longer.
Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
There are no voting machine standards. It varies by state, and in some states by county.
Some people see that as a flaw. I see the diversity of voting systems as a security plus. There was even an article in the newspaper shortly after the election stating that certain foreign governments looked into hacking America's voting systems, but it wasn't worth the effort because they were all constructed and implemented differently.
Dominion voting machines in Georgia is literally a computer hooked up to a printer that prints out a ballot for you that you turn in. Ballots are then scanned to get the results.
Yup. I think there is room for a lot more transparency and "double-checks" so to speaks built into voting going forward. Allow each voter to audit their own vote. We have the technology to allow for this to happen so there really is no excuse. This is really how you build confidence is the voting system. Anyone who is truly skeptical can cast their own vote and double-check it though the system.
I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.
> I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.
Unfortunately this is because they want to believe lies. If they did a small amount of Googling or simply watched a mainstream news source, they’d find that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan all used auditable paper ballots or receipts.
7/8 states that use unverifiable electronic voting machines that don’t have a paper trail went for Trump (e.g. Louisiana). The other is New Jersey, which wasn’t even accused of fraud by Giuliani or Trump.
It looks like the current holdouts (allowing electronic voting with no voter-verified paper trail) are Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.
I worked on campaigns for 10 years, I was an elected Hillary Rodham Clinton DNC Delegate and I witnessed real problems that should be of concern of every American.
Votes should be cast in person, with identification and counted by hand.
If Democracy is sacred we can wait a few days for results we can all trust. The system is clearly breaking down today where 75% of Republicans do not trust the election results and 75% of Democrats didn't trust the 2016 election.
What I saw was this. The voter file was completely inaccurate. It was very common to go to a residence where voters:
a. had moved
b. had died
c. had multiple 12+ voters currently registered at one apartment address, none of whom live there.
From my perspective there are real issues with sending unsolicited mail in ballots to homes because the government does such a bad job managing the voter file. Often it is deliberately mismanaged because "purging" a file is a loaded political term. Who wants to be that guy who deletes voters?
Moreover, my role as a campaign staffer was to collect votes. Often, people would ask "what do I vote for?", and I would just point and tell them what to vote for. This is also common. It also feels unethical.
Based on this experience, I strongly support voting in person, with an ID.
Don't trust me. If you would like to see this for yourself, volunteer with a campaign (any party) and canvass an apartment building in a swing state.
It is not a popular view. You are required to say there are no issues, even though the issues can be experienced by anyone who participates in a campaign.
I look forward to any establishment figure working to reestablish trust in political institutions and media reportage.
Before the problem can be addressed it must be acknowledged. Unfortunately, so far I only see finger-pointing and deflection. As far as each respective side is concerned, there's no problem on their end and they have no responsibility. It is all the fault of the others. The only thing that is changing is the increasing intensity of outrage.
Do you have a source for the claim that 75% of Democrats didn't trust the 2016 election? While I've read reports about frustration with the electoral college among Hilary voters and a fear of election interference from foreign nations, I haven't read much about that level of suspicion of ballot-level fraud. I would push back on the idea that those concerns (which I don't feel qualified to speak on that true validity of) are equivalent to the idea pushed by Donald Trump that there was a scheme to legitimately steal the election, as in to produce a situation where the votes cast do not determine the winner.
> The system is clearly breaking down today where 75% of Republicans do not trust the election results and 75% of Democrats didn't trust the 2016 election.
To the extent that's true, it has far less to do with voting machines than with self-selected information bubbles.
Sort of, but when the world is inundated with the message that all in-person human interaction is icky and unpatriotic and living on social media is the compassionate thing to do instead, the result shouldn't be a huge surprise.
> 75% of Republicans do not trust the election results and
If their mistrust is based on crazy, there's nothing that can be done to fix it except to cure that crazy.
And I think it's based on crazy: the reasoning seems to break down to: (A) belief that Donald Trump won implying (B) the election must be fraudulent (since it didn't confirm A).
It's been very interesting to observe because although I had heard the notion that malignant narcissists "can't accept ever losing" I realize I hadn't truly perceived what that entails. They invent an entire reality, Truman Show / The Matrix / Inception-style, where they didn't lose. And of course that alternative reality by definition has to feature some reason why there's a new dude in the WH now.
I think this is a good thing, hopefully it will bring to light any flaws that may exist in Dominion voting systems while testing whether any of these grandiose claims hold up to scrutiny.
And folks, let's not act like this is the first time voting systems have been scrutinized.
I'm actually really proud of Dominion here. We went from 2016 being totally hacked, and we all know it, and then in 2020 we had the most secure election in history. What a turn around!
The article states that at one point in time, at a voluntary hearing in Michigan, Dominion CEO said "It is technologically impossible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them". I think that everybody here is fairly technically inclined so what are your guys thoughts on this? My personal opinion is that using the term "technologically impossible" in this instance was not a good idea.
If @antirez is reading this, would love if you could provide any useful insights. FYI, I ask becuase of your background in research and development of "TCP Idle Scan" back in '98.
The claim that the CEO is disputing is that the Dominion machines are operated from a central location which can monitor and control the outcome of any action taken with one of their machines. The "technology" is specifically referring to the Dominion system, not "technology" in general. If the Dominion system does not include remote access, if it doesn't include remote monitoring and if it doesn't include remote vote management then "technologically impossible" is a fair statement.
They are not arguing that it is impossible for such a system to ever be built, they're arguing that their system is not built that way. Voting machines are audited and have a chain of custody, it would be very difficult to argue that "someone could hack all the machines and install this capability" fits within the realm of possibility.
> It is technologically impossible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them
Dominion machines aren't on the internet. Dominion doesn't have centralized access to all of their machines.
Could they eg send out an army of technicians to every voting location and use some insane side-channel attack to physically read and flip bits from across the street? Sure. But by that logic it's also "not impossible" for you or I to launch the US nuclear arsenal.
I think saying that "it is technologically possible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them" is "technically correct" but obviously not actually correct in any reasonable sense.
So it's not just a LAN connection that would be isolated to the network in the voting place (what you'd expect).
They also reported sending out updates to the machines in some precincts after certification, just before the election: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma... (not sure of the current veracity of this but bookmarked it as it was interesting).
Calling it impossible to flip votes is quite silly. You can just pre-program the machine to pick a candidate randomly every few votes and you skew the election. Do it after the first few votes to give you a distribution so as to only do it between the major candidates and not inflate any marginal runners. Do it only on machines in locations that vote against your preferred candidate and you skew to your candidate. If there are no paper receipts you just get away with it. If there are you can still attack democracy itself by sowing a bunch of doubt in the election. Electronic voting is a really poor idea. There's no credible evidence the US election was stolen but the way it's ran is appalling and makes this kind of mistrust easy, which is a very important failure mode as was evident this time around.
We had an election here yesterday. Each voter just filled in a pre-printed paper and dropped it into a box. COVID restrictions meant we had up to 10 minute queues depending on time of day, normally it's much faster. Each polling table is self-contained and had less than 1000 votes to count at the end of the day. They're just setup in school buildings on a Sunday when they'd otherwise be empty. Two hours after the election almost all of them had counted their votes, reported them centrally and that was available on a simple website anyone can see. There will be a central recount in a few days as a double check. It never finds any differences. Each of these polling tables is staffed with 5 or 6 people that double check what each of them is doing and makes it so there's a lot of people involved in the election further increasing the trust of the population in the process, because a not insignificant part of them take part. The scaling of the process is embarrassingly parallel so is workable for any size of country or election. I don't get why anyone would want to go through all the trouble of inventing these complex technology solutions to a non-problem that then create these huge attack vectors not only to actually do something nefarious but even more importantly to convince people that that has happened and rile up a mob.
Dominion machines print a ballot, which the voter takes — and as such, can see the vote — and deposits for counting separately. The final vote tally can be from the machines, but there’s always the paper ballots available to count — which is what a recount is: a manual count of the ballots. The machines simplify the process but they don’t change it.
Ken White has been talking about the potential for this suit for a couple weeks now. He spends a lot of time talking about what isn't defamation --- people use defamation suits and threats thereof to chill free speech, and he's a 1st Amendment guy --- but the Dominion cases are apparently examples of very serious defamation cases.
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:
"[Dominion will probable be] treated as a public figure." Why? I'd never heard of them before November 2020, and I imagine that is true for most people. I'd also be curious to learn more about what counts as "reckless disregard for the truth", if you're willing to share.
Most people (even people who follow politics) weren’t familiar with Obama before 2007 election cycle.
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 became familiar to politics-followers with his 2004 DNC speech, which instantly short listed him for the next Democratic primary. It also made him so popular he went around the country campaigning for other candidates. That's very unusual for a state representative in their first high-profile race. (It helped that he was basically unopposed in his Senate bid)
Great link, thank you! That's precisely what I was looking for (and I highly recommend it to anyone else reading this thread). It does seem strange to me that we set the bar so high for defamation, but its one of those times where the trade-off is very clear, and it seems like in this particular case "reckless disregard for the truth" seems to fit extremely well.
This is a situation where I think the law sort of fails us, alas. The spirit behind the idea of "public figure" in defamation suits is that these things should not be allowed to become tools used by the powerful to protect themselves from the weak. Being public means you are expected to tolerate criticism that would be tortious when aimed at normal citizens.
But the defamer in this case is the President of the United States and his legal team. That sort of falls down.
> The spirit behind the idea of "public figure" in defamation suits is that these things should not be allowed to become tools used by the powerful to protect themselves from the weak.
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.)
On a side note, interestingly every single post I've made in the last week has been downvoted. Even this one, which is literally just asking questions. Its almost like I'm being targeted. Dang? Is something going on?
You've been getting downvoted by a large number of established HN users, and from a quick look it seems to me that the fault lies with your comments. Maybe there are exceptions, but the ones I saw in that ended up with negative points were unsubstantive and often inflammatory. Please stop posting like that to HN, and make more of an effort to stick to the intended use of the site—thoughtful, informative conversation on topics of intellectual curiosity, avoiding flamebait. Do that and the downvote issue should go away. If it doesn't, you can email us at that point: hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't compound the guidelines breakage by posting like you did here.
Jurisprudence includes the concept of a "Limited Purpose Public Figure", which typically includes anyone or anything that is part of a prominent matter of public interest. It is not a requirement that this person or group be prominent before hand. Unfortunately this occasionally has the effect of making some plaintiffs a LPPF by the very nature of the allegedly defamatory statements made against them, but that's how the law works.
> Unfortunately this occasionally has the effect of making some plaintiffs a LPPF
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.
This doesn’t just happen to voting machine companies. Sometimes being smeared by a tabloid or newspaper might generate enough interest to make the victim a LPPF and raise the bar for filing a defamation suit.
If the court rules that the statements were false, but Giuliani is off his rocker and so Dominion doesn't get their billion, Dominion might still find that an acceptable outcome. They need their reputation at least as much as they need the money; a court ruling that the claims were factually wrong would go a long way toward restoring their reputation.
All the claims if significant vote fraud were thrown out by courts up and down the land, including the Supreme Court and yet still a huge mob of nutters stormed the Capitol. A mere court finding isn’t going to stop Dominion employees getting death threats.
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.
The most significant cases were dismissed on procedural issues without reaching the merits. That doesn't necessarily mean they had merit, but arbitrarily many procedural dismissals don't show that one way or the other.
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.
It's still super relevant to note that whereever they were in court Rudy et al were very careful to say we're not alleging or prosecuting fraud here because they could be hit with perjury for lying to the court. When not under the treat of perjury is when the election was a fraud.
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.
> 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.
I don't know how you were able to add a sane retort to the same echo chamber dribble that permeates this site without being banned or flagged, but well done.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
The cases were without standing or merit, the one victory was over letting vote count observers stand a little closer to the ballots
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
The counterargument has been heard. There are only so many times you can audit an election before you give up because the facts are not the point: there are plenty of people in the US who saw Trump as a savior because he's a mean spirited asshole who is afraid of a majority-minority country, and so they cannot comprehend how someone who was so popular to so many would have lost an election by such a large margin. Their brains are broken by a constant stream of alternate reality idiocy
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.
Laches isn't a "punt". Laches is, the courts don't like being used as a machine for your lawsuit to hold the public hostage. You don't get to see grounds for suing, do nothing, then once the results of the lawsuit will do maximum damage to the public, then sue. The courts are not interested in letting you use them for, essentially, blackmail.
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.
I used the wrong word, but it remains that the judges didn't normally rule on the actual arguments of the case, which were ridiculous in their own right.
Strong disagree. The judges dismissed mainly (totally) on two grounds - laches, and failure to state a legal case. If you're just whining, the court isn't going to hear you. Get out of here with that stuff and stop wasting our time, says the court. They aren't your chance to stand up and rant about stuff.
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.
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...
If you think there is fraud, how come none of the cases made a claim of this being an actual case of fraud and win the case? Either you believe both sides were on the fraud and all the cases were frivolous or this is not a real case of fraud and would not stand under scrutiny.
It seems quite naive to think that if the cases had made it to trial and lost that the “stop the steal” crowd would be satisfied.
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.
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 claim is that voter laws were changed by Secretaries of State rather than the legislatures as is required by the constitution. Secretaries of State changing voter laws is unconstitutional. Read the constitution. It’s crystal clear. That happened. It’s a fact.
Sorry.. Legislatures has the power to delegate that work and has been delegated to the Secretaries of State. It has been called out in multiple court rulings.
That was actually brought up in Bush v Gore in 2000.
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.
As to (3), Ken and others have also pointed out, Rudy or Sydney Powel being lawyers have a duty to know this sort of thing so there's a chance that they'll be found to have actual malice even without a finding that Rudy was knowingly lying.
Rudy also had a cybersecurity company and was named as a cybersecurity advisor. Would that help Dominion's side that this wasn't just crazy beliefs on Giuliani's part and be in favor of actual malice?
IANAL but "they should have known" doesn't follow from how they market themselves as a business unless it's a licensed profession. It's not uncommon for defendants to completely contradict their previous public statements under threat of a lawsuit like all the Fox News lawsuits where their lawyers win by claiming that it's an entertainment channel and their viewers should know better [1]. Beyond that, one can easily argue that political appointments and executive positions rarely deal with the nitty gritty details, instead providing value through things like political connections and existing business relationships.
You are kidding me, their defence in court is that they are bullshit artists, it’s just beyond parody. I’m starting to think we live in something far worse than idiocracy...
Dominion at the very least should be demanding they remove the word “news” from all their branding if this is to fly.
Nope. It’s very clear to even people who like that shit that Tucker isn’t “the news”. It’s very clearly overblown rants about anything that went on recently. It’s clearly a talk show on a channel that has news during the day. Hannity is even more of a nutter bringing in panels to get peoples’ reactions to shit that went on.
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”.
Tucker Carlson is the Republican version of Rachel Maddow (who didn’t hear a single conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia she didn’t peddle on the air).
Fox Noise is a joke. Mostly they are being watched so much because people find them entertaining. But they are danger to society and democracy. The lies they spew are the reason they been banned both from Murdoch home Australia, and Great Britain. I find it especially funny to watch Sean Insanity, Fucker Calrson, Lara Inbreed and Mark Lenin; they all just opinion-makers, its just happen to be extremely shitty but funny opinion.
I agree with you, but I suspect the rather childish nicknames are getting you downvoted.
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.
I think the point here was more that cybersecurity advisor is not a licensed profession.
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.
Giuliani explicitly and repeatedly asserted that he was working in the capacity of the president’s personal attorney. There was no ambiguity with respect for his role.
To be clear: Lawyers are held to a higher standard of conduct for the purposes of performing their jobs as lawyers. Giuliani could be disbarred for this almost certainly, etc... Lawyers are very much not held to a lower standard of criminal proof. They sit as defendants in exactly the same way and for the same reasons that we all do.
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.
Traditonally the obligation of proof lies on the person making the claim.
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.
Serious Question: Why is everyone assuming they're lying? And why doesn't anyone want to prove Biden won?
From my perspective, the accusations he made were completely dodged by Dominion and by Democrats (since their guy was labeled the winner by the media). 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.
The complaint by Dominion very thoroughly refutes all the accusations here, and shows convincingly that they knew they were lying. It's 107 pages and has a total of 235 footnotes: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20463212/rudy.pdf
IANAL, but that complaint reads weirdly. Most often these things are deadly dull and the facts are slowly laid out with evidence in the footnotes but that filing doesn’t play to type. I make no claim if that is right or wrong, just oddly spicy.
I have read too many court documents over the last 10 years and I agree. Generally, you want to start out with your strongest statement.
In this case, the strong argument is very easily legally defensible. It was very clear in context why Rudy was not pleading fraud because it wasn't the point he was making at that time. That's the strongest argument?
So I wonder what exactly is the point of this lawsuit? I'm going to guess given:
* 1.3 billion
* Spicy, as you said
This is designed for news.
When Rudy asks for discovery, it will either be provided or not. I suspect Dominion does not want to take it that far because any good lawyer can make a case for whatever they want given what discovery they get. The fact of the matter is that a Dominion(? not sure if actually Dominion) machine in Michigan was found (in court) to basically make up numbers, had logs erased for 2020 but not 2016 and a whole whack of stuff that was suspect.
A good lawyer should be able to make a case that it is reasonable to assume the machines were defective if not outright fraudulent in that case.
> When Rudy asks for discovery, it will either be provided or not. I suspect Dominion does not want to take it that far because any good lawyer can make a case for whatever they want given what discovery they get.
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).
I think the people who think that Rudy is afraid of discovery are expecting an email that says something like "We know Dominion machines are on the up and up but can we just make things up?" This email is unlikely to exist.
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.
"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."
Let me summarize the article and see if I can make a conclusion:
- 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.)
Did I summarize and comment fairly?
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.
Aside from the particulars in 2020, as far as I'm concerned, every single election should be audited to the highest standards possible and I cannot understand why anyone would disagree. This (to me) means adversarial parties trying to convince a third party of their version of the truth with opportunity for rebuttal. I don't feel that actually happened here which worries me overall. What we seem to have is one party says something, the other party takes to the news to offer a rebuttal and no one will be able to fairly hear both sides without piecing together bits of information.
It's for this reason I wish the Supreme court had taken up the case.
Well the Democrats agree, which is why they have repeatedly put bills up to secure elections better[1], Republicans have repeatedly stalled those bills, so I guess you can infer from that what you will.
Thanks, I'll review. The last "refute" I read in response to the technical report from Allied Security Operations Group[1] was ridiculous and contained no debunking evidence, so I sincerely hope this one is better.
As a general rule of thumb, if you make an extraordinary claim, the burden lies on your to provide proof if you want to be believed. Claiming that there was widespread election fraud, including by the companies making some of the devices, is an extraordinary claim. It doesn't appear there's been any proof provided to back up those extraordinary claims. As such, they can, and should, be ignored.
You're referring to Hitchens's Razor, which I believe is a flawed mindset that's used selectively as it suits people. The situation here is that the proof is very well hidden, and therefore the situation has been rendered un-falsifiable. This is now essentially a Russell's Teapot[1] statement.
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.
Because these claims were brought to court and dismissed without evidence. Quit concern trolling you know they were bullshitting and so does every other person with even the slightest technical background.
Since you bring up technical backgrounds, how do you feel about the voting machines having logs erased for 2020 but not 2016? And would you be against analyzing all election machine logs related to server-activity/internet-usage/usb-activity/code-execution-activity/etc? If you really claim that they were bullshitting, why is everyone so afraid to release that data? And not question why it was deleted?
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.
How about you show me a single credible source that backs up your claim the logs were deleted? Quit being dishonest, or worse spreading ignorance by accident.
Here's the forensic report from Allied Security Operations Group. Michigan politicians did everything in their power to keep this hidden, but a judge ultimately released it. This story was blackballed by MSM and censored on social media.
It's too difficult to decide credibility with the limited information we have and so the best thing to do is to look at opposing arguments to see which thing makes the most sense logically. In that respect, here is (I believe) the report which shows the numbers put out by the machine are not reliable, at least, and also gives evidence that 2020 log files were deleted whereas 2016 log files were not:
https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Mi...
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:
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.
>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.
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.
Yes, when I heard that there was a report of "68%" error rate from the machines, I was a little surprised. Then when I heard it came from comedian Russell Ramsland, I thought: "Oh, I bet he did something like count all the messages in a log file and divide that by the number of ballots counted". And sure enough...
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.
Isn't it your claim that proof is well-hidden and hence any argument to the contrary will just trigger the same defence that it is even more well-hidden? Which means, you are making an un-falsifiable statement and the burden of proof is on you.
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.
Russell’s teapot doesn’t fit in this case. Paper ballots exist. Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand).
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)
* Scan in ballot
* If there is an error in the ballot, send for adjudication
* Original ballot gets lost (destroyed?)
In one case, there is a clip of an official saying that they had a 60% adjudication rate which is concerning. Basically saying that 60% of votes were decided by people other than the voters.
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.
> . Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand).
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)
I forgot to touch on this in my reply...If what I mentioned in my reply did in fact occur, you now understand why "recounts" wouldn't make any difference.
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.
This doesn't come down to Hitchen's razor, or any other etiquette of debate or rhetoric. It is simple innocence until proven guilty. Asserting fraud is making an accusation that crimes occurred, and the burden of proof is not on the accused.
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.
"Innocence until proven guilty" is relating to an individual being formally accused of a crime in a court of law. We are talking about a PUBLIC PROCESS, which in my opinion doesn't fall into the same category. The burden of proof shouldn't fall on either side, it should be publicly verifiable.
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.
It's trivial to find analysis of the flaws in the Antrim report you linked.
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.
Every time the states did something to check the integrity of the election, such as hand-recounting the ballots, or doing a signature verification audit, it was simply dismissed out of hand as a cover-up and not a real investigation.
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.
See my flagged comment below beginning with "The general consensus is that this was a dynamic hack".
That explains why hand-recounting of ballots wouldn't make a difference. Also, I don't believe signature verification was widely used, or at least wasn't used in the critical swing states where it really mattered. It should be used everywhere considering the technology is mature enough and easily available.
This is exactly what I mean. The hand recount doesn't show the machines counted wrong, so conveniently you've got a workaround theory: "A specific number of newly created ballots could have been delivered during the after-hours(thanks to constitutionally illegal last-minute changes to voting laws in Democrat controlled states), and voter log-books could have been altered to match up with newly created ballots (hence the statistically improbable voter turnout in Democrat controlled areas)."
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.
> if you make an extraordinary claim, the burden lies on your to provide proof if you want to be believed.
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.
The machines in question vary in type, but most are scanners to aid in counting paper ballots. The others are touchscreen entry devices that print a paper ballot as a hard copy. Hand recounts of the paper ballots have been done -- statewide in Georgia, in one county in Michigan -- and not shown that the machines switched votes as alleged by Giuliani and pals. From here the conversation devolves into conspiracies about how the hand recounts weren't real recounts or fake ballots were printed to match the machine totals or something.
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.
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.
"Biden won" is the obvious outcome of counting the votes in the election, under the assumption that no fraud took place. That's the assertion which requires evidence. "Biden won" is the unrefuted null hypothesis that requires no additional proof, other than the result of conducting the whole electoral procedure.
With "mountains of evidence of fraud", and more than one person alone who could have pulled this off, that means there was a conspiracy. Let's say there were a hundred people minimum in this conspiracy. When someone tells me how the election was stolen, I just ask them to name two of the conspirators. Just two, any two. Conspiracy is so much easier to prove in the courts than the actual crime. But all I get are blank stares. "Fraud!" by utterly nameless people. It's like the voting machines changed themselves.
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?
If the alleged fraud did take place (and I'm not sure if it did or didn't), it was likely only a handful of string-pullers and lots of useful-idiots. There was so much emotion in this election cycle (based around hatred of Trump and people not realizing that different groups of people have different values), that they didn't have to look too hard to find the useful-idiots willing to help. A very well-orchestrated and strategic plan utilizing division and caps on information to those people could have pulled it off, all while minimizing loose ends.
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.
Burden of proof is on the accuser, and when the Trump side arrived in court over 60 times they didn’t bring any evidence. Occam’s razor says they don’t have any actual evidence, since if they did they would have brought it to court.
While I absolutely agree, it was disappointing that states didn’t go out of their way to prove Biden won, because now we have nearly 1/2 the country that isn’t quite sure.
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.
While in general I agree that election systems should be obviously secure to the average voter, in this case I seriously doubt that it would help. Fundamentally the issue here is that Trump and his hangers on are absolutely willing to just lie their heads off, and his fans don’t seem to care one bit. If their fans will believe obvious bullshit such as the theory that the dead Hugo Chavez rigged an election for Biden with the help of Dominion, why would they believe what the states have to say about the election?
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.
> it was disappointing that states didn’t go out of their way to prove Biden won,
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”.
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 replied to this on multiple other comments in this thread. (they may be flagged or dead so may not be visible unless you have your settings set to show dead)
"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% .
>If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.
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.
>If he himself was sold by the (false) facts he received from others, he is a more difficult defamation target.
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.
Giuliani made absolutely sure that courts understood that he was NOT alleging fraud in the lawsuits he filed and took part in because he was afraid that he would be sanctioned or disbarred for such actions.
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.
Rudy is “rich enough” that he can do what he does for ideological and/or narcissistic reasons alone. He could have been living a posh retirement years ago holding court and getting blotto everyday with other a-holes, but no, he doesn’t know when to stop.
According to an article I saw, his apparent purpose in firing people up was to sell "physical gold and silver" to them, to prepare for these uncertain times. And he was offering $1500 in free silver with the first order, too.
This seems to be a standard trope but I've never met anyone who fit it.
> 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.
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.
There is still meaningful court cases going on, in relation to this election. If you're curious to see all the evidence Giuliani and other lawsuits brought forward, here's a compilation of the evidence brought forward, sorted by significance:
Is the idea here that by putting assertions that were discredited and that failed in court cases heard by Republican and, in some cases, Trump-appointed judges in Airtable, they somehow gain credibility?
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.
The court system moves slower than the news. Many of these lawsuits are still ongoing. Simply stating "they were discredited" doesn't make the evidence presented less true. If you look at what is presented, you'll find much of it is quite compelling.
Can’t possibly be the case that a President who never won the popular vote and never polled above 50% approval during his entire term lost an election in which almost every poll leading up to it predicted his loss.
I'd love to see these so called patriots champion installing Gore for a bonus term since he was actually shafted by a mismanaged election. Nobody went looney bin insane over that.
To be fair: plenty of people went a little bit insane in 2000. But the elected leaders of both parties behaved like the adults in the room and the democracy survived just fine. For two more decades, anyway. Honestly the jury is still out on where we go from here.
> I’d love to see these so called patriots champion installing Gore for a bonus term since he was actually shafted by a mismanaged election. Nobody went looney bin insane over that.
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.
> Is the idea here that by putting assertions that were discredited and that failed in court cases heard by Republican and, in some cases, Trump-appointed judges in Airtable, they somehow gain credibility?
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).
> The courts didn’t “entertain” them because of standing. Cases weren’t thrown out on merits. No court has actually heard evidence.
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"
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.
The standard that a court uses when considering a motion to dismiss (e.g., Rule 12(b)(6)) is to first assume all of the facts alleged in the complaint are true. The judge then decides the motion as a matter of law. That is the exact opposite of weighing the evidence, which doesn't happen until trial.
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.
From the last sentence of that link (emphasis added):
> 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?
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.
> 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?
This is not true. There were 60+ cases involved here across five (I think) state jurisdictions and federal courts, and variants of this evidence was submitted and ruled on in quite a few.
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.
> It is also true that most of these were tossed for things like standing.
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.
The doctrine of laches sounds overly technical or dryly procedural, but its purpose is avoiding exactly what happened here. Election rules could have been litigated any time before the election (and many were, both successfully and unsuccessfully). But waiting until after the election has been run, when your requested remedy can only be to invalidate the entire outcome, is completely unworkable.
This is such an interesting point that it really throws the era of 'fake news' a judicial curveball.
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!"
That's not the defence though. The defence is 'I legitimately believed the election was stolen in Georgia, therefore, pressuring state officials to investigate said issues' doesn't itself constitute a crime.
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.
> The defence is 'I legitimately believed the election was stolen in Georgia, therefore, pressuring state officials to investigate said issues' doesn't itself constitute a crime.
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.
> You can’t kill someone because you think you are acting in self-defense. You have to actually be acting in self-defense.
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.
I bet we're gonna see a fight between Giuliani and Trump now. Sick of this whole tantrum, peeps, let's move on. We have a pandemic to tackle, we have a shitty economy, we have shitty buggy software, we have corps creating walled gardens threatening the existence of the internet as we knew it, etcetera. Let's look towards the future even if the climate change seems too daunting, we may find a solution for that too.
I wonder if that isn't figuring into a republican strategy: let's get the public so exhausted with our nonsense that the Democrats won't want to hold us to account for fears of irritating the battle-fatigued public.
That reminds me very much of “Donald has been” and am somewhat relieved it is momentarily quieter now. Republicans will continue to make noise in their voter base for sure but they have become castrated right now. The burden is on Democrats who really have no excuse to not fix things up, they have complete power
Dominion, as an operating business, has effectively been destroyed. No bipartisan election committee is going to buy their stuff anymore when it is an article of unshakable faith among one of the two parties that their machines fraudulently stole an election.
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.
Now if only all the other electronic voting machine companies would be similarly destroyed. There's no good reason to not have publicly counted paper ballots. Other developed countries don't seem to have problems running their elections that way.
Many of the machines, if not most, had paper ballot backups in addition to the electronic counts. When audited, the paper counts matched the machine counts.
So the issue isn't "electronic voting" vs. "paper ballots".
No, that's pretty much the issue. Voting isn't a technology problem; it's a funding and people problem like most political issues. Other countries--large, developed countries--don't take days to hand-count paper ballots, and the tallies don't need people blathering about audits and statistics for voters to have confidence in them.
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.
The way i see it voting machines mostly act as input validation to prevent faulty votes. US ballots can be quite complicated, it seems. The process still generates an auditable paper trail that is regarded as truth. Afaik there also have not been discrepances between the electronic and paper counts.
If people dont understand that printed paper ballots cant be changed by an air gapped electronic system you wont gain their trust anyway.
The point is that the electronic machines aren’t necessary to have secure and trusted elections. Our ballots are more complicated because the counting technology is.
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.”
Afaik the ballots are complicated because you also have tons of stuff like sheriffs, judges.. on it. And sometimes a confusing ballot is better for one party to suppress the vote of certain populations.
"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 ballots may have more votes, but they aren't more complicated: they're lists of choices next to which a person makes a mark indicating a preference. The "complexity" there is still not a technology problem, it's a people and process problem.
> 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.
In a court case in Antrim county Michigan a judge allowed an audit, which showed voting machine fraud. You can read the report here:
Democrats have in the past pointed out how prone Dominion Voting Systems is to cheating, such as presidial primary nominee Amy Klobuchar that was very critical of it in 2019
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.
If you watched the state senate hearings you can see these. Witnesses share their findings. As far as I’m aware Giuliani repeats these, in defense of his client.
Kinda feel like this lawsuit will go no where. Then again politics seem to be all that matter here. We shall see how it plays out, I suspect given the stakes Guiliani will go down.
Frankly, I’ve seen the evidence Guiliani has presented and I find it convincing, at least enough to warrant an investigation. It’s quite surprising the state of things. I urge everyone to do their own research and decide, particularly, watch the state hearings on election fraud.
EDIT: I personally think this is an effort to tie down trumps legal defense team during the impeachment.
> You think those are fake links to stanford law on his site? The sources are of equal validity regardless of the messenger.
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.
> 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."
That link contradicts you. If you take its contents at face value, there were multiple cases decided on merits.
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".
Yeah, there is a sense in which dismissal for “failure to state a claim” (which is very common for the Trump cases, often alongside other grounds like laches and/or lack of standing) is “procedural”, but it definitely and unequivocally amounts to a finding on the merits, since it is literally “does the plaintiff allege the actual elements of an offense, with specific alleged factual bases, and profer evidence which would suffice, if not countered, to prove each”. If you lose on that, it is exactly the court say that “ignoring everything else, if you went to trial, presented everything you say you have, and the defendant’s legal team slept through your whole presentation and then decided not to present a case of their own, you would still lose”.
There was a bit of a catch-22 in many of these. There was statistical and/or witness evidence that looking more closely at dominion machines and/or ballots was warranted.
However, the only way to actually be allowed to look was during discovery ... which required a suit to actually be heard rather than dismissed. So you don't get to go looking for evidence because you are told you don't have any evidence.
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?
Stating that you expect to find something specific during discovery is sufficient for the purpose of stating a claim. The issue for most of the cases is that the Trump campaign lawyers were very careful not to include in their claims that they believed that fraud had occurred, because they did not actually believe this, and lying in a court filing is a serious crime. Asking for a trial so that you can avail yourself of discovery but not actually claiming any illegal things you expect discovery to uncover is commonly referred to as a "fishing expedition", and is never permitted.
Antrim county was audited and no fraud was found. I don’t consider their expert to be particularly credible and their conclusions (with leaps of faith as to assumed motive) are not even borne out by the facts as they reported. An overly sensitive page size detection could produce the same discrepancies they claimed to find.
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.”’
You should read the Dominion filing against Rudy. They leave no stone unturned to show that not only were Rudy's sources not experts, but that Rudy knew they weren't experts.
Part of the problem is that Republicanism has become a bit of a religion: public policy positions have been increasingly replaced with incoherent dogma. Republicans have been claiming for years, completely without merit, that Dominion has been involved in a variety of vote-changing schemes. It is highly doubtful that Giuliani ever even checked to determine where Dominion's machines were even being used before he started in on various conspiracy theories to keep Trump happy. He and Lin Woods and Sidney Powell made similar claims about Smartmatic, which only has one client in the United States: Los Angeles County.
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.
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?
Dominion Voting Systems was created because ES&S was forced to sell Premier Election Solutions due to antitrust concerns. ES&S has been subject of various errors and controversies:
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.
Its been fun to watch. And really fun to watch the crazy news guys who had to lay out to their viewers they were lying to them in order to avoid more actions by Dominion.
Between server logs disappearing, servers themselves disappearing, USB devices being plugged into voting machines throughout election night, voting machines being connected to the internet, quick destruction of paper ballots, routing of vote data through multiple foreign countries, Dominion refusing to allow inspection of source code, and Dominion apparently being controlled by Chinese companies: Why do you assume he's lying?
You can look up each case and see what the rulings were, in some cases the lawsuits were dismissed before evidence could be presented. I have seen other people claim this and get buried which confuses me, is it just not ok to talk about the idea that there was election fraud which has been noticed but not confirmed? It should be OK to talk about this, especially in a democracy.
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.
You provided a long list of claims. I asked for evidence of one and an explanation for why the legal system hasn't done anything with this evidence since it has been massively litigated. The burden of proof is in you to prove your claims. You can't just say "fraud" and not provide evidence then hide behind diversity of ideas. It is damaging to the stability of the US to claim fraud. What you say has consequences. So either put up or shutbup.
There is a defamation lawyer right in the middle of the "election was stolen" story. Lin Wood.
All of this almost makes me think the Trump-side lawyers ganged up to force this outcome given that Lin Wood presumably knows what he is doing in the business.
>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.
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."
> 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 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.)
Interesting. Defamation aside, FUD, and 'fraud' claims aside, I hope this gets enough attention that they will actually fix the very real issues voting machines have had for the past decade:
I've heard reports of cronyism and incompetence around Georgia's electronic voting going back several years (don't remember if Dominion was the company used back then). Slightly worried this precedent could not just be used against crackpots, but also legitimate voting security researchers and watchdogs.
Would security researchers or watchdogs go around and say things publicly without evidence to defend their claims? Because thats what opened up Rudy for this lawsuit. He made unsubstantiated claims that possibly damaged the reputation of the company.
How would this be used against researchers or watchdogs in your opinion?
Voting Machine Company: "Our machines are 100% secure. The security consultant we paid to tell us that agrees."
Researcher: "Your machines have USB ports exposed, can flash firmware, connected to the internet, don't produce an auditable paper trail, and I hacked into a machine personally. 100% secure is demonstrably false."
Voting Machine Company: "Well, a third party verified that it is 100% secure so we're going to sue you (and probably not win) but it will cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend, unless you cease and desist."
Okay, but that wouldn't open up the researcher for a lawsuit, it would just provide the company with a PR leg to stand on. Nothing about this case is similar to what you outlined, and would not meet the legal requirements for a successful libel or slander case.
If any company comes out and says the product 100% secure, the tech community basically scoffs at them. It's not a good PR strategy for a company anyways. Now, relying on the reputation of another firm through audits is a totally normal way of doing business. This does not compete with researchers, and has by and large included researchers (stuff like Bug Bounty/Responsible Disclosure programs) as a good control. So any researcher looking for this stuff would likely have a protected way to disclose their findings.
Further, this is supported by another compliance body in the SEC via SOX. There has to be a protected whistleblower program for publicly traded companies. So, the ability to disclose security gaps is not neutered in any way by this court case, no matter how it plays out.
I wish someone would honestly respond to the suitcase video, but I haven't seen any attempted defense of it yet. I would really prefer not to believe Giuliani, and yet that video is pretty damn hard to get around.
None of it matters, of course, because realpolitik, and the biggest sin of the viking cosplayers was believing that any of this evidence matters.
The ballots were on camera in the room the entire time, if reporters had been sent home they still wouldn't have appeared out of a mystery suitcase. They were sealed on camera, then unsealed on camera, and counted on camera. They have been counted and recounted and recounted.
I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
>The ballots were on camera in the room the entire time, if reporters had been sent home they still wouldn't have appeared out of a mystery suitcase. They were sealed on camera, then unsealed on camera, and counted on camera. They have been counted and recounted and recounted.
Here are the sworn affidavits that state the observers were too far to monitor what was being done with the boxes when they were brought in during the day [0].
>I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
Here are the sworn affidavits of two poll watchers that say they were sent home [1]. This corroborates what David Shafer says happened that night [2]. Also ABC news reported the same, their source was Regina Waller [3].
I don’t have anything to add on monitoring distance, but both of the affidavits you linked specifically agree with the video that they left and not that they were kicked out, because everyone thought counting was finished for the night. Neither of them claims they wouldn’t have been allowed to stay if they had stayed until the room was empty.
What the state investigator says, and what those affidavits both appear to agree with, is
> Nobody told them to stay. Nobody told them to leave. Nobody gave them any advice on what they should do. And It was still open for them or the public to come back in to view at whatever time they wanted to, as long as they were still working.
I’m going to give more credence to the affidavits of the people who were directly involved over the wording from ABC.
One of them did return later and was allowed in, but arrived as the counting was complete.
It’s an unfortunate situation that everyone was told it was closing down and then the secretary of state’s office called to tell them to keep counting, but that doesn’t support Giuliano’s claims about rigging the election with suitcases of ballots from under a table.
>I don’t have anything to add on monitoring distance, but both of the affidavits you linked specifically agree with the video that they left and not that they were kicked out, because everyone thought counting was finished for the night. Neither of them claims they wouldn’t have been allowed to stay if they had stayed until the room was empty.
It seems the reason they thought they were done counting is because a supervisor told the counters to go home, and said that they were done counting for the day.
Relevant part from the linked document (paragraph 8):
"Sometime after 10 o'clock p.m., the counting activity slowed. Shortly afterward, a younger lady with long braided but blond hair yelled out to all of them they should stop working and come back tomorrow (the next day, Wednesday November 4th) at 8:30 A.M.. Thereafter, all but 4 election employees left State Farm, leaving just the blond haired lady (who Michelle and I assumed was the supervisor), two older ladies and Regina Waller at the location. This lady had appeared through the night and Michelle and I believed her to be the supervisor."
I think that while it is possible the observers could have just stayed there until everyone left, it is likely that they believed what they were told -- that the counting would finish the next day.
At any rate, it is at best a bad look. I agree that it doesn't prove fraud or anything close. It does, however, look suspicious and IMHO warrants further investigation.
Yes, I've seen that. It corroborates exactly what Giuliani was saying: the decision was made to bar observers and media from the room from the night, and the decision was made to nonetheless continue vote counting activities in their absence. That's the whole problem.
The only thing the statement adds is that they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. That is not the same thing as having observers. Even North Korea investigates its own elections and concludes that it does nothing wrong.
I must have missed the part of the video where media and observers were barred from the room, rather than simply having left. Could you give me a timestamp?
With the whole thing being on camera and knowing that no secret ballot suitcases were smuggled in, are we to believe that in the absence of observers they somehow rigged the counting machines to mis-scan these ballots, even though the hand recount for Fulton only differed from the initial count by 0.07%?
The observers are not there to make sure the ballot scanners are working. They're there to audit the portion of the process which can never ever be re-audited: the provenance of secret ballots. Of course if you re-count the same ballots over again you'll come up with something roughly the same. This "hand recount had identical* results" mantra to reinforce the core idea "the election has been independently verified" may work on the general public but it shouldn't work on HN.
There's no need to believe the suitcases were smuggled in, although you yourself appear to have doubts in that direction. For example, they could be perfectly authentic ballots with some flawed provenance. A priori this seems the most plausible explanation.
> rather than simply having left.
Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
> The observers are not there to make sure the ballot scanners are working. They're there to audit the portion of the process which can never ever be re-audited: the provenance of secret ballots
But the provenance is on camera. Those ballots were right there with the rest of them. What exactly is the “auditing” you think the observers would have done that the Republican secretary of state’s staffer didn’t do?
If that’s the issue with the video, then why does everyone’s main concern about it seem to be that they came from a box under a table? There’s certainly an implication that these were fake ballots that had been snuck in surreptitiously, given that its origin was clearly shown in the same video but had been cut out.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But then why is it called “SuitcaseGate”? Does “StandardContainerOfAbsenteeBallotsGate” not have the same deliberately made implication?
Beyond that, I don’t disagree that poll observers are important. But the ballots at this point had already been removed from both of their envelopes and stacked for scanning, while the observers were all present. If there was a flawed provenance to them, the observers observed it. At the point where those ballots were taken out of the box and scanned (again, all on camera) they’re nothing but pieces of paper with some bubbles filled in.
There’s no name. There’s no date. There’s no voter address. There’s no signature. Just ballots. Any questions of their provenance could only have been addressed earlier when they were taken out of their envelopes under the supervision of the election observers.
So with no observers present, they were pulled back out of the boxes and fed through the scanner. What did the observers need to observe that wasn’t captured on the surveillance tape? What part of this unobserved scanning process can’t be confirmed by a recount of the same ballots?
> Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
The Mitchell Harrison affidavit linked by another commenter specifically explains that he and Trevin McKoy came back that night and were escorted into the building. Counting had stopped before they arrived, but the point stands you’re bullshitting about it “having the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening.”
Okay, so they weren't permitted in until counting had been completed. They were told to leave because counting was complete, then when they came back (due to a tip, not an invitation) they were delayed at the door until all activities they wished to observe had ceased. This isn't getting any better!
Your whole argument boils down to "there's no need for observers because I trust the process". The whole point of observers is that it shouldn't be necessary to just trust the process. Right now what you and the media and HN are telling me, on pain of cancellation, is that 100% of the essentially self-selected people involved in the election are honest. That all of the dishonest people decided it was too much bother to do a day's work to influence the outcome of the election, because The Process is infallible. I guess I should be thankful that all the dishonest people didn't bother voting either, right?
> Okay, so they weren't permitted in until counting had been completed.
When they arrived at the front door they were told counting had already been completed. Not sure whether you misread that or are suggesting the security person was lying about what was happening inside.
> They were told to leave because counting was complete,
They were told counting was complete, they were not told to leave, and they do not claim they were told to leave. But I can't blame them for making that assumption.
> then when they came back (due to a tip, not an invitation)
Agree with you here, when the secretary of state's office called and told them to resume counting, some effort should have been made to get the observers back in.
But the only work done was scanning of ballots that had already been cleared, and it was all on camera, and all of the work they did while unobserved can be directly confirmed by recounts. So even though this happened, I don't see how it's evidence that the election was rigged.
> they were delayed at the door until all activities they wished to observe had ceased.
Having arrived at the front door after counting was finished, the one guard at the door stayed at the door instead of leaving his post, and he radioed someone else. The second person escorted them in, where they confirmed that yes, counting had ceased as they were told.
Is there a couple minute window in there where you could say "the second person took too long and was stalling to cover something?" Sure, allow me to flex my creative writing muscles to concoct a reverse-heist in which this could actually matter and have affected the election:
1) The (democratic leaning) Fulton County election officials shut down counting for the night and allowed observers to leave.
2) Observers having been cleared, they colluded with the (republican) secretary of state's office to arrange a cover to resume scanning ballots.
3) They then used the unobserved counting session as an excuse to unseal the boxes under the table of verified but uncounted ballots.
4) Having these containers of ballots open, they hacked the security cameras to cover their activities.
5) The footage we've seen was actually recorded in a replica of the ballot counting room that they built in a warehouse last October, and the people seen counting ballots on it are all actors.
6) With the cameras hijacked and no observers present, they introduce and count fake ballots that did not actually come from the previously observed and sealed boxes.
7) Steal election!
I don't have the full quality video recording or the forensic knowledge to analyze it, but as conspiracy theories go I don't find my scenario particularly compelling.
Ralph was in charge at State Farm Arena when those videos were filmed.
Edit: yes, I called him and we spoke back in December for about 30-45 minutes. I originally called about the barriers blocking observers during the recount and then asked about the suitcases as well.
Are you referencing the barriers that were filmed... from inside the room... by the dozens of national media crews and party observers? Those barriers?
Yes? They had metal fence barriers (like at a concert) up with chairs behind them for the observers. During the recount they had the observers 30-40 ft back which meant they weren't observing anything. They were just in the room.
I saw the obvious issue with this and called to ask why. His response was that "legally we're in compliance."
Wherein people posted views from the other side of the glass claiming they were trying to count the votes in secret or something. Which was ironic, given all the news crews and observers on the other side of the glass documenting the same thing.
I agree that its BS to keep observers so far back that they cannot meaningfully observe the counting.
I'm almost certain that you're concern trolling in this thread.
However, if anyone else is actually interested in an explanation of this incident from the people in charge of the election, check out this 60 Minutes clip:
That's a lot of footage. Can you point to some more specific example of these "carefully phrased allegations" to check out, if I'm mildly curious, but not that interested to spend much time investigating?
This is hn and we should recognize the inherent weakness in electronic voting machines for the blatant issue it is. That said, the primary retort I keep seeing is something along the lines of "well, but these produce an auditable paper ballot".
So my question is this: How much of those auditable trails have actually been audited, in what places, and in what numbers (I don't think spot checks will suffice to reassure people, the numbers need to be a statistically significant percentage in the most contested places), and, more importantly where are the results of these audits being published?
The entire state of Georgia. where Guiliani alledged that votes were "switched" by Dominion machines, were in fact hand counted and affirmed the machine-counted tally.
Even after the hand-count clearly confirmed that the machines had not switched any votes, Guiliani spread the same lie. This is actually documented in the suit.
Mind you, it is not that the vote-tally machines leave a paper audit trail. The vote-tally machines work by scanning the actual paper ballots.
Ah ty, this is what I was wondering, I figured the outrage was mostly posturing but still want to approach the issue outside of that drama. I mostly want to see where the audit results are published.
Seeing lots of throw-away accounts popping in to drop misinformation... At least five, by my quick count? Seems like it would be helpful to disable commenting for new-user/low-karma accounts for certain threads.
Opposing political views are badly taken on HN, so many people might create extra accounts to comment political posts?
There is enough affidavits, and statistical anomalies to warrant an investigation. And until there is one, anyone is free to claim voter fraud. But nonetheless all comments claiming fraud to be tangentially possible are getting destroyed. Even though the media has been bragging how easy is to hack a voting machine after Trump 2016 win. After 20 million for "Russia collusion" which was badly founded, and resulted in not much, is there nothing to investigate this election? Or would it be too embarrassing?
Until there is an investigation, there is no "misinformation", people should be free to express doubt, and support allegations of voter fraud.
It looks to me like you've created a dichotomy between pre- and post-(hypothetical)-investigation discourse. From that dichotomy you then claim by fiat that no statements or allegations pre-investigation can be reasonably labeled as misinformation.
That certainly doesn't follow, and neither does the flipped implication that it wouldn't be reasonable for someone to make a good faith claim of voter fraud after such an investigation.
I'm not sure what to call this type of fallacy-- perhaps "phantom goal posts?"
1. My point was the opposite, people should be free to make allegations of vote fraud, as they are to allege that it was fair.
But blanket calling one side of the argument misinformation, is a waste of time for everyone, unless there is a good claim to back it up.
An allegation of rape can be misinformation but it probably has to be investigated first?
You shouldn't just call it misinformation without backing it up.
2. After an investigation you can still make claims, but you would be more liable to lawsuits. Or, in an online discussion, it would be more probable that you would be wasting everyone's time. e.g. people that keep insisting Trump works for Russia. For that we have conspiracy forums.
Your comment was completely unnecessary. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps "the phantom footbal referee"
> My point was the opposite, people should be free to make allegations of vote fraud, as they are to allege that it was fair.
Even broadly speaking, there are two separate buckets for each claim:
1. allegations of voter fraud supported by evidence (circumstantial or otherwise)
2. wild allegations of voter fraud
3. allegations of fair election results supported by evidence (circumstantial or otherwise)
4. wild allegations of fair election results
There were myriad examples of #2 circulating around the election, many debunked even before they started to spread more widely. I see no reason to call these claims anything other than misinformation.
Given the incentives for each party after the initial vote tally of the election, there happened to be a lot more examples of #2 than anything else. But the exact same logic applies to #4, esp. in authoritarian countries where that kind of misinformation is more common.
I see no reason to provide additional support for threads with limited value to the HN community. If you want to discuss politics or general news there are plenty of sites for that.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this entire posting is literally a discussion of politics/general news.
The tone of "I see no reason.. limited value" seems a bit condescending to what appears to be a sizable portion of HN that values intelligent debate, and there can be no debate with only one viewpoint.
> I'd have flagged it already but "voting machines" is vaguely tech related and it's still here.
Agreed.
> It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.
Fair point, but in a flame war, HN runs a risk of having a one-sided discussion. Of course, some people believe that the losers in any particular forum should be silenced, because the majority view must be correct.
There's no value in a flame war, regardless of which side is the majority. Extremely heated subjects do not lead to positive results here or anywhere. The only way to win as a person is not to play the game despite the very strong temptation.
But to your point, if you can't convince someone of the value of your contribution then perhaps it just isn't valuable. Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
> There's no value in a flame war, regardless of which side is the majority. Extremely heated subjects do not lead to positive results here or anywhere. The only way to win as a person is not to play the game despite the very strong temptation.
I agree, and the oblique War Games reference is appreciated.
> Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
(Who would believe such a thing? Well, I guess there was the FCC Fairness Doctrine, but fortunately that's gone.)
Of course not all opinions are equally valuable, but an echo chamber of people parroting the party line also has no value. In fact, that has negative value to me; I'd prefer a cacophony of divergent opinions to a single narrative.
I'd just like to see the top 10 or 20 comments instead of the top single comment.
HN was not designed for topics getting 500 comments -- those comments are there you have to scroll/page to get to them. But I guarantee though that the replies to that top comment are mostly rebuttals; very few people reply to a comment to agree with it.
Are you sure you're arguing about something that's an actual real problem here?
Agree such threads presently have limited value, hence suggestions granting readers greater dominion over them. Sans, excessive polarisation remains a risk for any topic.
Is excessive polarization an actual problem here? It doesn't seem that way to me. It seems mostly there are butt-hurt people who don't like that their opinions are unpopular, unhelpful, or illogical while everyone else (on whatever side of the issue) is happily commenting.
The only times I've ever been downvoted excessively, I've deserved it.
It depends when you ask. Most times checking this thread it's been dire. The current top 3 commenters, comprising the first page of comments:
"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."
"I think it's nuts for a modern democracy to allow for anything but open source software being used to count paper ballots with chain-of-custody records, voter ID validation, biometric markings, and redacted ballots being published on the web for all to view and count independently."
"I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy"
It's the definition of polarisation, entirely one-sided views, and each side demonstrably not thinking impartially. The first and third threads are largely echo-chambers with heavily-downvoted opposing views (which are often reasonable). All threads have some useful discussion, but its divisive opposite comes in seemingly combative/reactive waves that are stark in their coordination.
A community rooted in computer security (and AI) shouldn't be reliant on the naive idea that each anonymous online forum account represents one real person.
The suggestions made initially might go some way toward mitigating harm resultant from this reality of our current internet, which - thus far, almost exclusively for some specific political matters - HN seems to pointedly ignore.
In general: long-form, balanced, well-researched essay comments are exactly what's exhibited on HN, and precisely the reason many frequent the site.
It is starkly obvious to frequent visitors when comment threads deviate from this norm into highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless and yet miraculously-synchronised agenda. That this only occurs pertaining to particular topics, and reliably so, reveals to incumbent readership that those engaging in this activity, whilst possibly attempting to blend in, are actually standing naked in full view.
Indeed, in some cases this ineptitude suggests a low level of social awareness possibly consistent with that of a language model.
Regardless, tools to assist genuine readers in filtering such content and reversing its own filtering is a suitable mitigation, largely without negative side-effects.
> well-researched essay comments are exactly what's exhibited on HN
For technical subjects. If you want a good conversation about politics, you should go where those experts are.
> yet miraculously-synchronised agenda.
Hey look, a conspiracy theory! As for highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless, you'll find that wherever politics are discussed from forums to the dinner table. There's no point in adding tools so people can create their own bubbles inside of off-topic discussions.
Organised efforts to sway public opinion using technology is not a conspiracy theory, it's present reality and if we don't watch for it and err on the side of caution, it will only get worse.
The stance that this is not worthwhile and that no measures should be employed to mitigate it is negligent at best.
Instead of filing massive law suits, why doesn't Dominion attempt to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the machines were _not_ biased with technical evidence.
I feel that open sourcing their code would definitely do the trick. It is kinda baffling that something as important as an election is ran on closed-source proprietary codebase.
Any voting machine that doesn’t have printed paper ballots is questionable and should not be used. Dominion machines do, unfortunately there are a few non-swing states that have fully electronic voting still.
The precedent this would set would be disastrous. Any bad actor could try to force a company to release IP to prove they aren't acting maliciously. We have the legal discovery process for a reason.
My point is that unvetted IP/code shouldn't be used in democratically critical processes such as elections in the fist place, doing so increases the surface area of bad actors to act maliciously.
> Instead of filing massive law suits, why doesn't Dominion attempt to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the machines were _not_ biased with technical evidence.
Why would their code matter? Far more important than the code is the paper ballot audit trail their machines produce.
It's also quite interesting that Democrats have tried multiple times in the past two Congresses to provide for election security laws, with mandatory paper ballots AND standard auditing, and yet Republicans refused to bring any of those bills to the floor in the Senate.
Democrats have already introduced a new election integrity bill providing funds for secure voting. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1/te... - Look for “Subtitle F—Promoting Accuracy, Integrity, And Security Through Voter-Verified Permanent Paper Ballot”
Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. Democrats are perfectly happy to spend even more money to “prove” their wins are real (although it’s actually mostly solid Republican states that use insecure voting machines that don’t have a paper trail and should be forced to upgrade).
Regardless of who got how many votes, our system needs to have as much transparency as possible. And that starts with use of open source software & hardware for elections. Then with making sure that people that are allowed to vote do.
And you think open-sourcing it would calm down the claims, and they wouldn't claim exactly the same + "well of course they didn't use the software they gave us the code for"?
> Instead of filing massive law suits, why doesn't Dominion attempt to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the machines were _not_ biased with technical evidence.
All right dstola: For the purposes of argument, I accuse you of being a thief who has embezzled millions of dollars from some company you've worked for. Instead of suing me for defamation for my lie, why don't you just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you didn't steal anything? Maybe you could open source your bank account data, and all your movements to show that you couldn't have opened any secret accounts?
That's a ridiculous ask. The malicious accusation of embezzled is a lie that harmed you, and proving your innocence won't compensate you for the harm caused by that lie. These lawsuits are about the harm done to Dominion.
Also, no analysis of any kind would ever satisfy the people who believe the 2020 election was marred by vote fraud. That belief isn't based on evidence, and massive amounts of evidence to the contrary hasn't convinced those people. There's no reason to think one more report would make any difference.
> Maybe you could open source your bank account data, and all your movements to show that you couldn't have opened any secret accounts? That's a ridiculous ask.
Actually, maybe not open source, but otherwise that is exactly what would happen should I be suspect of being a thief. No reason why dominion cannot show their source code to professional investigators to get their name cleared right? If they are so vocal about being innocent, why not do it?
We don't know what's in Dominion's source. The code should be open sourced. The binary that's being used should have a checksum that can be easily checked by an election monitor.
853 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] thread>This is my contribution to the Trump team's legal case against election fraud. The Kraken was a crowdsourced legal case that they were building with the help of hundreds of volunteer experts, but most of it never got to see the light of day. We were explicitly told not to release any information to the public because that could undermine their case, since it would expose our work to the ongoing media slander campaign and allow the defense to more easily prepare counterarguments. Clearly that's no longer a concern, so I'm publicly releasing my contribution to the case.
>Interactive Colab notebook with code and full replication of findings: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1PwiipIQif63EMCxGFYA...
>The key takeaway of this analysis is that the Biden vs. Trump advantage of a vote tally reporting batch is highly (i.e. extremely) correlated with meta information about the counting process itself. This implies that if you counted the votes a different way you would have gotten a different final total, which is absolutely preposterous and a clear indicator of fraud. Additionally, we don't see this happen
You can see how they work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9BDiO3JGTs
This is pretty much the gold standard: a paper trail that can be audited every step of the process.
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else? You can even buy a house from your phone now. In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
The future is paperless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
"Antiquated" is a loaded word that smacks of ageism. Restaurants are antiquated, too. Do you never go out to eat?
Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else?
Are you trying to say that every other country votes paperless? Because that's simply not true.
You can even buy a house from your phone now
You have obviously never bought a house, and certainly not one from your phone. Just because there's an ad on YouTube doesn't make it true.
In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close.
Why is that necessary? What benefit does it provide?
The future is paperless.
People have been saying that for over a hundred years. Yet, here we are, still with a durable, recordable medium that does things that paperless methods can't.
The modern restaurants is kind of recent, right? It was invented around the same time as the bicycle.
I'm not. No one understands as well as technologists how often “novel technology” represents a regression from the tried and true, and how much the cry of “new” is used to sell defective crap.
> You can even buy a house from your phone now.
This is technically partially true in that a lot (not all) home purchase and finance paperwork can be done via electronically signed documents, and if you have a tolerance for extremely bad UI you can sign those on a phone. Typically, you’ll still need some wet signatures (notarized even) at the end of the process.
But that’s, even if it was completely accurate, a different problem domain than voting. (Both have concerns for assurance, but only one also has nonattribution as a critical goal.)
I actually do think that digital voting is theoretically possible, if done cautiously and in an open source manner. (it needs to be fully open source to be verifiable at all)
A remaining problem is that -in an election system- every voter needs to be able to check and perceive that the election was honest. That could still be a bit tricky in a society where not everyone is a programmer.
Another is that by going online you instantly open the attack surface up massively. Currently to steal an election you have to physically move a large number of people to a broad set of voting sites or send in a lot of forged mail votes. Those both require physically doing something in the US where an online system lets anyone in the world potentiall attack the system.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02613...
Hand counting remains the golden standard for voting.
What is for sure - with voting machines, there is less validation. Hand counting means - all ballots are counted always (by volunteers with all parties invited) - whereas voting machines means a spot-test (in some states), and only a full manual count is when a recount is demanded.
All this to say - I think Dominion did a thorough job - but this all only happened because the election was close. What about those where the election isn't "close"?
However, a losing candidate may request a recount after the election. In most states, if the margin is outside of a stated threshold, that candidate must pay for the recount. If there is a discrepancy between the two counts, then a hand recount is performed.
If an election isn't close, then the respective Secretary of State will audit (by hand) a random selection of precincts to verify vote totals match, but this is a security check and generally takes place weeks after the election.
Here's the conundrum - what constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
What constitutes what's "out of threshold"? If a voting machine, either by design or flaw, pushes a close vote outside the threshold - then that's a way to bypass the checks & balances and can be exploited by the unethical.
That paragraph is disingenuous. A vote that is outside the threshold for an automatic recount is not a close vote; the margin between candidates is thousands of votes (or more).
If a voting machine has a design flaw or other flaw, that would have been discovered during one of the several inspections and trial runs it was put through before being certified for use. Moreover, many states now require paper receipts of all ballots cast (as a result of Russian hacking of election machines in 2016), so if there is any suspicion of manipulated results, the human-legible ballot receipts can be tallied. States with these types of printed ballot receipts will audit the electronic tallies against hand-counts of the printed ballots on a random precinct-level basis.
It's a scalable method. Yes, the reconfirmation at the regional levels are important.
Your faith in machines is questionable. I leave you with this obligatory xkcd - it's still completely valid: https://xkcd.com/2030/
I don't trust the machines, but I do trust the people doing the counting, especially since the counting process is observed by both sides.
> 36 million votes were cast in France in the last election.
> The U.S. is capable of counting 36 million votes by hand overnight as well, and most votes were once counted by hand in the U.S.
I don't understand this argument. In France, a population of roughly 67 million people can count 36 million ballots by hand overnight. That's 1.86 people per ballot.
In the US 328 million people cast 160 million ballots. That's 2.05 people per ballot.
Since counting is done at each individual polling place, what's actually keeping the US from doing the same as France? It's not like they're shipping around all of the ballots to one place, and they're limited by geometry and ballot distribution to volunteer counters. Create a polling place per 10,000 people, and within X miles of everyone. Smaller polling places would finish faster, but the big polling places don't really have to scale past what European countries already count successfully every election.
Voting in France is like a rain spread out over the country, because the population is more spread out across geographic centers. It's easier to handle votes.
Voting in the U.S. is like a series of scattered torrential downpours, because more than 70% of the population lives in a metropolitan area. It's not simply a matter of the number of bodies, at the scale the U.S. metro areas deal with you have significant concerns about the physical logistics related to moving that many ballots that much smaller, less dense countries do not have.
But hand-counting works because it's virtually impossible to coordinate fraud widespread enough to actually make a difference. Whereas, if your entire voting system is computerized and all the computers are linked together, causing widespread changes are much more possible.
Do let me temper that slightly :
Some states didn't or didn't fully have a paper trail quite yet https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Also, be aware that Dominion voting systems actually acquired the old "Diebold Election Systems", who were not so secure a couple of years back. (though things may have changed by now, of course) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions
Since Trump won 7/8 of those states, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that Trump’s team successfully hacked the electronic machines in those states that have no paper trail.
However, there’s really very little reason to believe there was fraud in this election - but those republican states (and New Jersey) should replace their DREs without VVPAT by the next election so that they have a secure paper trail for auditing.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Had this election been entirely hand-counted, the same claims of fraud would have arisen. When a candidate declares in advance of an election that he can only lose if there is fraud, you can be sure he will act in bad faith if he loses.
Incredulity was all he needed to claim fraud - the numerous conspiracy theories explaining the fraud would inevitably surface after the fact. If it's not Dominion voting machines, it's dead voters, boxes of ballots showing up, and hand wavy claims of the opposition being in charge of the counting and abusing that role.
This here is another example, nobody did any voting security research, some Trump associates just made up the idea, and were able to easily spread that messages to millions of people, playing a large part in inciting an attempted coup. The maker of that device is now suing for damages, as they should, and your concern is free speech again.
It seems almost performative.
It's a debate we've had with secure messengers the benefit of having that many eyes on a piece of software outweighs the minor risk of a secret zero day.
The keys should be secure, but the design of algorithms and implementation of the system should not be.
If you hide away the source code, then only criminal actors and security agencies can evaluate security flaws. Open sourcing, at least, places legitimate security researchers on equal footing with these groups, so flaws can be disclosed publicly and rectified.
That being said, I think there are sufficient safeguards in the process that effectively mitigate any potential compromising of Dominion software. The software prints out the voters' ballot and the voter is given an opportunity to review the ballot before scanning it with a separate machine and it entering a locked box. This allows for a manual recount to guard against any possible shenanigans.
One additional step they could take, would be for the voter to verify their vote after scanning. This would ensure that they actually read the ballot. Though I could see that causing problems if the voter, for whatever reason, decided to repudiate their vote while travelling between the two machines.
https://xkcd.com/2030/
https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_m...
Ramsland lists "Fenton" without specifying Fenton City or Fenton Township. But the turnout Ramsland lists for Fenton does not match the turnout in either jurisdiction.
The actual turnout statistics reveal the inaccuracy of Ramsland’s numbers. His figure for North Muskegon is off by a factor of 10: The actual number is 78.11%, not 781.91%. For Zeeland Charter Township, he inflated the turnout nearly sixfold. For Grout Township and the City of Muskegon, his number is more than triple the correct number.
" Antrim County failed to properly update its system. A purposeful lack ofproviding basic computer security updates in the system software and hardware demonstrates incompetence, gross negligence, bad faith, and/or willful non-compliance in providing the fundamental system securityrequired by federal and state law. There is no way this election management system could have passed tests or have been legally certified to conduct the 2020 elections in Michigan under the current laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures –Michigan requires full compliance with federal standards as determined by a federally accredited voting system laboratory "
" Significantly, the computer system shows vote adjudication logs for prior years; but all adjudication log entries for the 2020 election cycle are missing. The adjudication process is the simplest way to manually manipulate votes. The lack of recordsprevents any form of audit accountability, and their conspicuous absence is extremely suspicious since the files exist for previous years using the same software. Removal of these files violates state law and prevents a meaningful audit, even if the Secretary wanted to conduct an audit. We must conclude that the 2020 election cycle records have been manually removed. "
so this is just made up?
First paragraph: simply made up by Ramsland, by basically treating all the times a ballot was entered incorrectly (such as upside down) as a vote requiring adjudication.
Second paragraph: False. The person in charge of updating the system...was a Republican. Also, the voting machines were in compliance with federal voting system standards. The machine that was not updated prior to the election was the computer that the voting machines connected to, which was updated after the election during vote tabulation. (A hand recount of the paper receipts printed on Election Day confirmed the post-update count.)
Third paragraph: Also fiction, and quite literally contradicts your first paragraph. (They can't both possibly be true; either the adjudication logs were there and there were a lot of adjudicated votes, or they weren't, and the first paragraph is made up.) Also, the machines were audited after the election...by Republicans.
On a further note, neither NASA or MIT has any record of Ramsland or any of his companies, doing any work for them as he claims (and which forms the basis of his supposed technical expertise).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Also read this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Stop making throwaway sock puppet accounts every time your lies are rightfully downvoted and your posting rights restricted. Your lies aren't "sensitive information".
We've ALL heard the tired old conspiracy theories you're parroting before, and we've ALL seen them thoroughly debunked already. You're the only one who seems surprised you were duped.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
In case anyone's worried about it, yes, we ban accounts for this regardless of which ideology they're flaming for. It's an existential issue for HN; we'd rather not burn to a crisp, regardless of the color of the flames.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/12/audit-in-michigan-county-r...
It's funny how things change. Just five years ago, HN was awash in people shouting that paper ballots are not secure and everyone should switch to electronic. Now the conventional wisdom is the opposite. Much like the way that in the 90's, keeping a password on a Post-It note was considered not secure, and now it's the safest thing going.
Instead, time after time, we get shady software from shady people with disturbing political connections (I’m not talking the dominion thing either — this seems true for all voting software). The idea that crooked politicians hire crooked companies to wrire crooked software shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Subscribing to this kind of "digital bad" dogma is lazy because you don't have to think for yourself.
But when people think elevator software is broken, they don't take the elevator. When (enough) people think voting software is broken, they topple governments and start civil wars.
And some people who disagree with you are still thinking for themselves. That "not thinking for yourself" is lazy argument.
But why would they be distrustful unless non-sequitur arguments are presented as the holy grail of truth? "Bro trust me, software engineers and our entire profession are total hacks". Thanks XKCD, very cool.
Yet you fly in airplanes and drive in cars that are digitally controlled. You trust the unsecured web with your banking details because a green padlock appears in your browser. The federal reserve and their network banks don't mail each other IOU's "to be secure" so why should that be the MO for accounting public consensus? I'd call it tired reasoning but it's not even reasoning, it's just some hand-wavy appeal to.. p a p e r
1. Voters vote by marking ovals with a marker pen on paper ballots.
3. The paper ballots can be counted by the optical scan machines that are already widely used in many places.
4. The paper ballots can be hand counted.
5. All the ballots can be published, allowing anyone to independently verify the counts.
6. An individual voter if they choose to can make a note of short alphanumeric code that is revealed when they vote for a candidate, and using that note later can verify that their vote was included in the total and went to the correct candidate.
7. An individual voter cannot prove to a third party that they voted for a particular candidate.
Here is a paper on such a system: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Here is a paper showing how it satisfies item #7: https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502
Almost all of the cryptographic mojo takes place when the ballots are printed, so no modifications are required to the scanners. You do have to use a special marker to mark the ballots.
Doing the cryptographic verification of all the votes would almost certainly be done by software, but as all the ballots are published and the system is completely open and documented, independent parties can easily do their own counts. The software is also fairly simple.
That's Dominion's statement. They're describing a pretty exceptional situation / distant from what I would think of as security research.
Obviously that's not a legally binding statement or anything but I think that at least illustrates what this situation is about.
This isn't a case of someone being mistaken or putting forth a good faith concern about security.
These accusations are based in nothing at all, disproven, and Giuliani and others just kept at it.
Researchers usually have actual evidence for concerns and so forth. And their motivations usually really is security.
This situation with Giuliani and actual security research seem completely disconnected.
After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims).
Dominion Voting Systems is not a public figure however, its a company. That... probably makes it easier to win this case.
Still, if Dominion's lawyers think that this case is worth pursuing (despite the difficulty of defamation / libel / slander), that doesn't bode well for Rudy.
> After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?
The accusations of there being no voter fraud in the 2020 US election fraud aren't baseless: all the verification checks have passed, and for that to happen and fraud to have occurred would require a conspiracy of unbelievable scale and secrecy. Also, the claims that there is fraud are not just baseless, they're incoherent.
While Russia may make baseless claims their elections are fair, there's more than enough evidence to disbelieve them (like how they disqualify and murder their political opponents).
Why not?
They could also just be wrong.
There's a reason why eye-witness testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence there is.
I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
Are you asserting that some of the same people who filed affidavits also entered the capitol own jan 6th? Is there any evidence for this?
> I think what you say is true of most people, but it seems very clear that we have a group which doesn't behave like most people.
I think we as a society are moving past the whole "judge some people by the actions of some different people" thing.
For what it's worth I imagine many of them think they're telling the truth, or at least are honestly putting their name to something they've been told and believe. That also doesn't mean they're right though.
It's like when you hear a muffled audio recording but it's incomprehensible, and then you're told by a headline, "Can you believe Mr. X just said Y?". Then you listen again, and voila, you interpret the audio as Y. You've been primed to hear Y, so your brain hears it.
When you've been primed by all your anti-establishment media sources to see fraud, then you think back to that time 3 weeks ago when you thought you overheard two coworkers at the mail-sorting center talking about "post-dating the ballots". Well, maybe they didn't say "ballots" exactly... But it was "post-date the fourth", and surely they meant "November 4th", right? I mean election day was the 3rd, and they weren't trying to count late ballots, were they? But what else could they have meant? And they sure looked suspicious when I came over and interrupted them. I mean they didn't mention ballots again that whole conversation because I guess they were worried I would tell someone.
Reading through some of the affidavits and watching the interviews gives the impression that these are well-intentioned folks who just wanted to report something without understanding the context, and they've been primed for fraud. Unfortunately, they get picked up by politicians and media figures who have a clear pro vote-rigging agenda, and get made a martyr for the cause by plastering their face all over OANN, Project VERITAS, etc. It's depressing to watch.
Edit: For fun, here's a tweet demonstrating the audio-priming example you can try for yourself! https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1086436669413183488
https://www.citizensvoice.com/news/crime-emergencies/forty-f...
https://www.phillyvoice.com/voter-fraud-pennsylvania-trump-e...
https://www.dailylocal.com/news/chester-county-man-facing-tr...
Which makes sense, when you hear from your news sources that the other party is committing massive fraud, that gives some people an excuse to do so too.
If anything it’s surprising that Pennsylvania only caught 3 Trump supporters trying to do it (see links in ancestor comment).
I see no reason why all of them can’t be wrong (not necessarily intentionally lying).
2) and other witnesses wildly embellished their credibility, Joshua Merritt, aka "Spider" aka "Spyder" was listed as a military intelligence expert, while what is able to be verified is that he enlisted in the training program but failed to complete the entry level material.
The arguments have been made, the evidence has been examined, to say /no/ investigation has occurred is willfully misinformed at this point.
1)https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/politics/2020/12/04/evid...
2)https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-...
The affidavits are very explicit - they directly call out names and roles. They are specific in what was actually witnessed. Go through them if you really care about truth. Otherwise we have nothing to discuss.
At least in terms of convincing "everyone" of anything, it's turtles all the way down.
This lawsuit will be an investigation of sorts. If they aren't baseless, dominion can't win.
It is curious that of all his public allegations against Dominion, he never asserted those in court. He is a lawyer and is aware of the consequences of asserting false accusations or frivolous suits in court. No doubt he will point to Sidney Powell and claim he was in good faith.
Most of the claims he made were pretty outlandish, and IMO he (especially as a lawyer) should now better. This is going to be interesting.
He publicly claimed that the Dominion machines "switched votes" even after the hand-count in Georgia confirmed that the machine count had indeed been accurate.
- The machines could be connected to the internet according to Dominion's own documentation, contrary to what Dominion CEO said in Michigan.
- Dominion machines were used even in Venezuela to aid a corrupt regime, which in & of itself does not prove anything, but in view of above aspects need to be looked into.
- Signatures & id's were not checked for mail in ballots & even for in person votes in at least some of the swing states. Why? It's quite remarkable that for Covid vaccines now, id's are mandatory.
- The Ratner NIA report is explicit & absolutely clear that China & Iran were able to access the Dominion systems. Please read it.
- 96% of Dominion political donations went to democrats. https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/dominion-dem-donors/ Isn't this even a teeny bit suspicious??
Politics aside, it looks like HN is not even able (ready) to examine what the truth is. Especially when ~30% os US population think that the election was fraudulent. If elections are themselves questionable, then do we have any hope of having a nation anymore? What if the shoe was on the other foot?? Trust but verify is all I ask. If information is censored then how will ANYONE verify anything???
Which is more damaging to US political institutions, having an illegitimate president or admitting that the election was stolen?
I'd wager an admission of election changing fraud would make it almost impossible to recover any trust in political institutions. What would be the next steps from admitting that the election was fraudulent?
Given the above, I'm not sure it matters. Of course that scenario is still possible, if evidence is produced. The institutional incentives align towards keeping the results as is. Proceeding from there, what can be done to restore trust?
*Disclaimer, please do not misread this as an assertion of evidence existing, not existing or the validity of it.
What steps can practically be taken to restore trust for the average person, who might not be as cynical as myself?
If either side is genuine about their beliefs, a first step is probably enforcing single-issue bills in Congress.
“Christianity” isn’t a unifying philosophy; even more recently than 50 years ago, the most dedicated evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant Christians were campaigning against the single largest Christian denomination in the country (Catholicism) as vigorously as against non-Christians, and many of our key religious freedom rulings were a result of Christian or Christian-adjacent groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses figure particularly prominently here) resisting impositions by more dominant Christian groups. Kennedy got much the same kind of attacks for being an (actual) Catholic as were directed at Obama for being (supposedly) a Muslim.
And if the short history in America were not enough, look at the troubled history of Christian-Christian relations in Europe and the Near East.
The problem I think is that you are starting from the assumption that America had a uniting mythos that only recently fell apart, rather than America having had deep, vicious internal divides throughout its entire history that were sometimes temporary subordinated to even stronger shared opposition to external forces.
> It wasn't always this vicious, or this pervasive in its viciousness, in my lifetime.
In our & our parents lifetimes, we had the "even stronger shared opposition to external forces" of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union to keep these divisions in check.
America's divides have been terribly vicious in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War), and some of the current things that divide us even have their roots in that era.
And even then, the Civil Rights and Anti-War and other internal conflicts of the 1950s-1970s weren't insignificant.
Nixon killed any real trust in the 70s generation that raised the 90s kids, and Bush v. Gore, the war in Iraq, and Obama era drone strikes on US citizens without trial have killed any real trust in the 90s kids who raised the current generation. The current adult generation is having that killed by what is going on right now.
There's been three generations of general distrust (if not outright cynical belief that the government is _always_ lying), and that's not going to come back any time soon. I'm not sure there is anything that you can do beyond radical transparency and time.
We're at this intermediate stage because the previous solution was to just give all the power to a bunch of people, likely the ones that killed more people.
Using elections instead of military power is an improvement over middle age, but you still have a bunch of people with a lot of power.
There's absolutely zero trust possible.
Maybe after western social democracies wreck the economy for the umpteenth time, people will try to remove power from governments until they disappear.
Biden, his cabinet, and tons of both Dem and Republican senators and other officials were arrested. Proof of their vast crimes was shown. They were court martialed and found guilty.
However, it was decided this was too much for the American people to accept. Overturning the election and showing the crimes of these politicians could lead to Civil War.
So an agreement was reached: Biden and other deep state elements wI'll be allowed to move freely and serve their terms. President Trump would "concede" and leave office. But this is all for appearances.
Behind the scenes, Donald J. Trump is still President. This plan, known as SHADOWPREZ, was seen as a last resort. But it worked.
Anything that happens in the next 4 years is actually President Trumps doing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta
given the foregoing, are you sure you want people to trust the government?
Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
Well I don’t know, in 2017 a professor asked us if democracy was in crisis and I thought “its never been healthier”. For the first time I can remember, people were actually trying to hold the President accountable for something. Now it is true that most of that was driven by the fact that they didn’t like who the President happened to be at the time, so maybe we can get that to work in our favor again.
> More specifically, it would be nice if establishment media and political figures didn't respond to this distrust with castigation.
Well on the one hand I agree with that, but on the other hand this is the result of some complicated interactions (no matter how you view the facts on the ground). If their distrust is actually motivated and harmful then I’m sure its not an act for those establishment types to castigate it. On the other hand such activity is sure to increase distrust. So we’re stuck again.
> Distrusting government would still make sense for me personally. It would be idyllic if people looked towards decentralization, localism and private solutions. Trust in their local institutions or community, while drastically reducing the purview of the federal government. That's just my personal preference. I'm not sure it is applicable in the widespread, pragmatic sense.
I agree generally
> Some kind of political figure reaching across the aisle, recognizing the concerns of those who feel disenfranchised looks like the pragmatic solution that isn't happening. Instead I see actions and accusations that are predictably creating more division.
I agree
Proper investigations were conducted, and no serious issues found. The lawsuits were laughed out of court, even by Republican judges.
Its surely possible that all those "sworn affidavits" can be wrong in some way: AFAIK, they were either bogus, irrelevant, or from people who didn't understand what they were seeing because they hadn't bothered to familiarize themselves with the vote counting process before they became election observers.
The more pertinent question is: how could anyone still believe those lawsuits could have merit at this point? The sad answer is: disinformation works.
This is a tort that he actually committed, not a crime, but otherwise that’s what is happening. Not every violation of law is a “crime”.
In case someone thinks this is splitting hairs, I fully support Dominion suing Giuliani for his alleged defamation. I would be somewhat horrified at the Attorney General attempting to put him in jail for it, ceteris paribus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/world/asia/thailand-revie...
This century is very young for laws that were never frequently invoked, but, yes, at least one in Kansas in 2002:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/941/criminal-li...
Defamatory statements draw lawsuits. Nothing terribly new or worrying about that.
> It’s a bit worrying that total lies about a conspiracy between Dominion and (very much dead) Hugo Chavez to rig an election for Joe Biden is what gets classified as “dissent” these days.
I'm not sure if you can really even call this a "classification." It's more of a false equivalency, either made in bad faith or through some sloppy bit of emotional reasoning.
I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing now (another similar example is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25898393). It's like some people are experiencing certain generalized feelings, then applying charged words to what triggered those feelings without understanding either the words they used or the thing they're commenting on.
Probably not, I'm mostly responding snarkily to how deeply conspiracy theories have embedded themselves into the body politic.
More important is the idea that a well formed[0] defamation lawsuit is something that requires public attention and redress. Attempting to call this defamation lawsuit something that is suppressing dissent smacks of a hamfisted attempt to make this lawsuit into something bigger than it actually is. Giuliani and his ideological cohort made a bunch of defamatory statements about a company, and predictably that company is suing for defamation. There's nothing terribly surprising or concerning about that.
0 - Defamation lawsuits can be used to suppress speech, of course. This is exactly why many states now have anti-SLAPP laws on the books. That however does not seem to be an issue in this case, as this lawsuit is at least well formed.
If Dominion can prove those things to the satisfaction of a judge and jury, they should win. Our justice system is supposed to deter people from breaking the law.
I took GP meaning that they want corporations to shut down anything they don’t like. That’s typically what’s meant by chilling speech.
Non transparency. Bullies chasing out witnesses and poll watchers.
Why?
In his own words: https://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-...
Pardon me for getting the exact same results for like 1/80th the amount of work.
Go ahead and dismiss all of those videos because they are in a supercut featuring Scott Adams. You do you.
Why would anyone waste their time tracking down the original videos when they already know, out of the gate, that he's taken things out of context? That's a waste of everyone's time, and EXACTLY why he's doing what he's doing. He knows most people won't bother to fact check his lies.
The correct course of action is to tell everyone what he does, and until he proves he's changed his stripes and starts acting in good faith, to ignore him.
I believe my comment is relevant to the one I replied to: I do not trust Scott Adams to present his content with any integrity at all, and so sending me a video he clipped together to make a point is not what I'd consider "good evidence". He does not act in good faith, he works backwards from a conclusion. If Steven Miller made a similar video about immigration I wouldn't trust it either without an in-depth review of the sources he relied on. I do not mean for this to be some ad hominen policy, I am not saying Adams and Miller are by default wrong because of who they are, but they don't deserve anyone's trust.
If I have missed some nuance because I couldn't watch the Adams video for myself then you have my apologies for this misunderstanding.
"All black people know each other"
"Everyone I disagree with is the same person"
To anyone else clicking this, it has been disproven repeatedly, Adams doesn't care that he's spreading lies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNM3K0cH2tc
A simple fact check: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/10/fac...
A number of the clips though look like they're from the Detroit counting at the TMC Center where some Republican observers weren't allowed back in after they left because the room was at capacity because they'd been replaced by other Republican observers. At no point were there only Democratic observers or a significant imbalance, both parties had observers that weren't able to reenter!
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/10/fac...
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/864522009048494080
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019...
> During the tour's stop Friday in Seattle, Clinton pointed to FBI Director Christopher Wray's warning last month that Russia continues to pose a "very significant counterintelligence threat" and that efforts to influence U.S. elections with "social media, fake news" and "propaganda" has "continued pretty much unabated."
The Capital Hill attack was partially a result of unchecked claims from Dems and left-leaning media claiming Trump was an illegitimate President. Somehow people here think that's ok while Rudy/Trump's claims are not. Smh.
I think there is a reasonable distinction between that statement and the specific claims of fraud we have been seeing for the last few months.
also the downvotes for not toeing the blue team line are strong
Edit: grammar.
So, I think the dissenters at least got the skepticism part right. The problem, of course, is that a healthy level of skepticism should only inform the investigation of facts, and then perhaps new legislation and oversight. Without the investigation, oversight or legislation... the skepticism is pointless.
For example, it's unfortunate that gaming machines in Las Vegas have more oversight and regulations than voting machines. That doesn't necessarily there is a problem with voting machines, but it does mean we could do more to ensure there isn't a problem with them now or in the future. Dominion has not done anything to lose my trust, but when it comes our elections, we should have proper oversight over these machines (no matter who makes them since there are multiple suppliers for voting machines).
Which is the tell that Trump didn’t believe his own claims of vote fraud. Bear in mind he pulled exactly the same stunt in 2016 claiming massive vote fraud but when he won never mentioned it again until 2020.
If he’d actually believed there was vote fraud or a chance of it, he would have done something about it. Investigations, hearings, technical audits, best practices and standards. Statistical analysis to identify issues (as against the analyses that do happen that show insignificant fraud). He had 4 years to sort this out. You’d think it would be one if his top priorities.
Of course none of that happened because the whole show is entirely performative. In fact doing anything about it would take his excuse away, because if he addressed vote security he couldn’t blame vote security issues on anyone else.
There was even a voter-fraud commission set up to investigate the claims. They quietly disbanded.
A class case of "we refuse to look for evidence, therefore there is no evidence"
Also why pick on Padilla, why not Jon Husted (Rep, Ohio). What about all the Republican lead states where massive fraud was supposed to have happened? Trump expended no political capital or effort whatsoever on doing anything meaningful about supposed voter fraud, and couldn't even persuade any Republican state administrations he had any credible evidence or reason for alleging it. He just gave up immediately at the first hurdle of being asked what he wanted to do and why. In fact he didn't even pursue this personally, he just delegated it to some flunkies and walked away from the issue until the next election.
How to explain this? It's almost as if he had no credible reason for making the claims and the whole thing was just for show.
So many "skeptics" are actually incredibly trusting patsies, they're just trusting con-men instead of mainstream discourse.
For the same reason it's (probably) baseless for a coworker of yours to claim you've been embezzling millions from your employer for years. It's basically a false accusation.
It's not baseless to claim voter fraud when you have proof. It's baseless when you claim voter fraud without any actual proof.
>If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.
It sounds like he expects the President of the United States to act with the integrity the office commands. Not ask/condone/allow his lawyer to lie on television (where he can make up any lie he wants) while admitting there was no fraud in court (where he's actually held legally accountable for his statements).
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/judge-cancels-fraud-evidenc...
Are you claiming that you're more informed than Robert Mueller?
Trump colluded with Russia
The biggest reason to doubt the "voter fraud" theories this time around is because of who is making the complaints, not because the voting companies (or the laws surrounding e-voting) are beyond reproach.
There needs to be a very high tolerance of criticism towards voting machines and the companies that make them. Ordinary standards of transparency are not enough, for example.
There is. It's called the 1st Amendment.
If the company is suing for defamation, that is also their right. Giuliani isn't some small fish being silenced by a defamation suit.
Well, there's also the fact that the folks advancing these theories are insisting that they're being "kept from gathering the evidence", when in reality much of what they're saying is contradicted by evidence.
For example, the instances cited in the lawsuit where Giuliani and others continued to insist that Dominion voting machines had changed the Georgia election outcome by flipping votes, even after the original results had been confirmed by a full hand recount.
Too many arguments boil down to people, and motives, not facts. It is a bad idea to put the short term desire to see a foe vanquished over the long term cost of bad laws and policy.
Laws are not perfect, and I'm not convinced we want the basis of democracy to be closed source voting machines, or that even if we do, the checks and balances as they stand are currently 100% correct.
Not the same kind of paper trail that exists when a voter fills out a paper ballot.
If I fill out a paper ballot, that ballot is independent evidence of the votes I intended to cast, because I filled it out directly, with no machine in the middle. So that paper ballot is a useful auditing mechanism for checking on machine-generated vote counts.
If I electronically cast votes on a machine, and the machine prints out a paper record of my ballot, unless I, the voter, leave some record that I inspected that piece of paper and agree that it reflects the votes I intended to cast, it's useless as an auditing mechanism. As far as I can tell, no such voter inspection record is made with electronic voting machines.
- get ID validated & ability to vote
- get an initialized smart card
- insert in polling machine, fill out stuff
- submit, get printout from printer
- scan printout into a machine
- return smart card
At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout.
The printing and the scanning felt terribly wasteful but as it turned out, it became a precious way to audit. The bonus is that the printout is normalized, not some person's handwriting that could be subject to misinterpretation.
Were these Dominion voting machines?
Poll worker validates proper ID, get ballot code for your precinct, walk to voting system, poll worker enters the precinct, voter validates info on screen, voter votes on the touch screen, system prints out choices, walk to scanner system, vote gets scanned, scanner stores those ballots in it's tray in case need for audit.
How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?
The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.
As far as I know every state will issue a picture ID, similar to a driver's license but which doesn't confer driving privileges. to someone who doesn't drive.
If the argument is that people who can't drive will find it more difficult to make it to the office that gives out government issued IDs, the obvious solutions are (1) put more of those offices in places like inner cities, convenient to public transportation, and (2) have the political activists who spend so much time complaining about disenfranchisement do some actual work instead and provide people transportation to and from the offices.
> the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote
The solution to that is obvious too: either fix the state law or fix the tribal ID requirements so they meet existing state law.
When you're done, the machine prints a paper ballot and asks you to inspect it. You then click OK on the machine, take the ballot from your booth over to a separate counting machine, and deposit it there.
It's really quite pleasant, there is a strong audit trail, and the machines afford a wide variety of assistive options (large font, headphone jack for audio, different languages, etc)
Also I had the option to get a printed ballot and fill it out witih a pen if I wanted to.
For mail-in ballots, a hand-filled ballot is scanned, and if there's a discrepancy it gets corrected then re-printed by an official in a process called adjudication. This is supposed to be done in front of an observer from both parties so security checks like signature matching can be performed, which was not done as evidenced in the Fulton county video footage.
Mail-in voting creates the opportunity for mass manufacturing ballots as well as hijacking ballot adjudication processes, especially if you block bipartisan observation to circumvent security checks put in place specifically to mitigate these types of fraud.
And "hand recounts" would not uncover these issues. [1]
You don't need "widespread" fraud to overturn an election. Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
[1] https://billmoyers.com/story/georgias-hand-count-of-2020-bal...
Mail-in ballots work the same way they have since 1864. You fill out a paper ballot and mail it back.
> Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.
16% of counties - when more than half the US population lives in just 4.6% of the counties. Remember that many counties are nearly empty and have few voters. Due to the rural/urban political divide, sparsely populated rural counties typically vote for the GOP in recent elections while densely populated suburbs and cities lean more towards the Democrats.
Biden’s numbers in general were similar to Hillary’s in 2016, but he gained ground in the suburbs due to white educated voters fleeing from Trump after the last 4 years. There is no indication that a “few key counties” were targeted - the shift was seen in all 50 states. Compare Texas suburban county votes in 2016 to 2020.
Mail-in ballots get counted by machines.
Read the interview I posted with Philip Stark, Berkeley Math Dean who is probably the leading expert on election auditing having designed the procedures for conducting risk-limiting audits in many states. He explains this in detail.
Creating accounts to do that with will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
These rules apply regardless of which ideology an account is battling for or against. Our goal is not to have this site burn to a crisp of a particular color, but rather to have it not burn to a crisp at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What would you have people do? Maybe have the volunteers just scan the ballot by hand and then write down on paper the vote totals?
The argument just boils down to “machines are scary to me” and that isn’t a good enough reason to abandon progress that is routinely shown to work just fine.
What I'm not sure about is whether that is actually the way it is done for all electronic voting machines.
This is how it is done in many US jurisdictions as well (including all the ones I have voted in).
The reality is, there are always ballots that fall in a grey area. That's being exploited to sow doubt in the uncertainty of an entire election.
Hell, same thing happened during Brexit:
> The first stage will see all ballot papers - though not actual votes - counted, a process known as verification.
> Any ballots which are later rejected are included in these verified ballots.
I submit it COULD happen there, too. Votes being counted by local authorities, making judgement calls, and the plan being to announce the preliminary results if the election is "clear" that night.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36044026
Since there is only a single question there is tons of whitespace between options and you can't accidentally mark selections for one question in the space asking a different one.
I've never had to vote in a referendum like brexit, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn the ballot was more complex that the usual parliamentary election one. Looking at images of the brexit ballot it appears pretty similar to what I'm used to, but with far less white space between options.
I didn't say any such thing. Of course there are disputed and spoiled ballots, and these are resolved quickly by the volunteers and local observers from the parties taking part in the election. Unless the number of disputed ballots exceeds the difference it's not really a problem. Recounts happen, especially where there's only a few hundred votes in it.
Spoiled ballots (where the voters are actively protesting by scrawling "I hate them all!", or some other message across the paper) are tallied separately, but are otherwise ignored when calculating the election outcome.
There’s also the fact that the ballot is white text on black with a white circle to fill in. This design decision is ingenious in how it eliminates doubts about voting.
So I don't think the UK evidence shows what you claim it does. The smallest UK spoilt ballot error I can find is larger than the winning margins in many US places.
Finally, here's [4] one analysis of voting tech versus ballot spoilage rates that seems to reach similar conclusions of all the papers I scanned over. Hand edited paper is about the worst way to get valid ballots of any method in this study.
[1] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[2] https://www.votenone.org.uk/spoilt-ballot-results-2015.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/19/spoilt-ballots-pc...
[4] https://www.hamilton.edu/news/florida/Klinkner%20Analysis.pd...
Or maybe you didn't read the study....
On the Florida study. Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it read to me like the punchcard system was worst, followed by ballots scanned by a computer at the precinct, then "other", which is the two counties using other system that sound quite different to each other. It wasn't clear to me at all that they had any sort of rating of how many inadvertently spoiled ballots came from hand written, hand counted systems vs others. I'll readily admit that I'm not any kind of statistics expert though, so the study wasn't straightforward for me to follow.
In parliamentary systems, you elect people so they can vote on those matters for you.
Same in America too. Hence, representative democracy. It’s why we have Congress: to vote for us. The problem is that the citizens feel left out in certain issues, so instead of replacing the politician, they make propositions a thing. Boom! Now you have 5+ more things to vote for. Add in county and local governments, and it gets to be 20+ things long.
But that's on me, the voter; it's up to me to check that my ballot reflects my intent before I submit it to be counted. If I make a mistake, I can always ask for a new ballot. So the paper ballot reflects what I, the voter, submitted to be counted, and that's the best that could possibly be done as far as an audit trail is concerned.
I was curious who makes the voting machines that are used here. It's apparently a company called ES&S:
"Election Systems and Software (ES&S) 11208 John Galt Blvd, Omaha NE"
https://www.essvote.com/
Someone has a sense of humor, at least.
If the voter can easily see that the ballot reflects their choices, then it's not useless as an auditing mechanism. That's hyperbole.
Remember, if there is massive/systematic fraud going on, then every instance doesn't have to be caught to uncover it.
https://statescoop.com/georgia-buys-new-voting-machines-with...
https://apnews.com/article/5a76e11db8e64f7ca32197f2934a86df
That's a valid concern when you're dealing with a good-faith actor. But if voting machines are open-source (which I heartily support), they'll move on to baselessly discrediting something else to shape public perception. The problem isn't the technology per se. The problem is we're not dealing with a good-faith actor.
Voting is a system that needs to be simple, transparent, and auditable. The technical solutions are 0/3 and an example of “over engineering” leading to a poor quality solution.
Our current voting system is well below international standards — and it’s because of the technology.
Second, considering who we're dealing with, it fundamentally doesn't matter. They aren't actually arguing for more secure elections, they're looking for any reason to throw out the results because they lost. If systems were up to "international standards" (I don't know what those are, can you be more specific?) they'll just say they're "liberal commie standards that you can't trust, and we need American standards" or some nonsense like that.
By all means have more secure elections. Just know that it won't do anything in a scenario where the loser claims any result other than their victory is "rigged".
"This study applies Benford’s law to detect anomalies in county-level vote data for the 2020 US presidential election. Most prominent distribution violations are observed with Republican vote counts in blue states, all vote counts in states won by the Democratic candidate, and Democratic vote counts in swing states. Distributions are anomalous in swing states won by the Democratic nominee and not anomalous in swing states won by the Republican nominee. The results are robust to two-digit analysis, Monte Carlo simulations of p-values, broad or narrow swing state definitions, and when compared to distributions observed in 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections." - Detecting Anomalies in the 2020 US Presidential Election Votes with Benford’s Law, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3728626
See the leaked memos from Diebold here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/
In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.
Do you know where the Dominion validation process is clearly documented so it is easy to see whether it is easily subverted? I will bet the answer is no, and the software and hardware are all trade secrets and impossible for voters to verify :D. Sounds like a totally trustworthy system to me.
The verification process in Georgia involved physically counting all of the paper ballots. The Dominion machines were totally uninvolved in the hand-recount (and, unsurprisingly, the hand-recount found that the original machine tally was extremely accurate)
Again, I think it's pretty clear you don't understand what role the machines actually play in the voting process.
Your claim seems to be that the Georgia Secretary of State (a staunch Republican and Trump supporter) along with the governor managed to pull off a huge operation to secretly change the results of the election (which would have involved hundreds of people and require that none of them speak out). That's a really outlandish claim, and requires supporting evidence, of which you have none.
I would prefer not to believe the election was stolen. I wanted Trump out, and Biden seems a reasonable replacement. I also debunked a number of the fallacious statistical 'proofs' the election was stolen. Believe me I would like nothing better than to believe everything is fine. But especially Navarro's report makes me unable to dismiss the allegations off hand with a clean conscience. I've also looked into the PA court's reasons for dismissing Trump's lawsuit from back in Sept, and the reasoning is all based on technicalities and does not address the substance of the concern that the loosening of the rules has opened the door to major fraud. The fact all the coverage of the lawsuits is frivolous dismissal or even in some cases the courts rule in favor does nothing to set my mind at ease.
Are there other, more credible, sources that are influencing your thinking? There is zero evidence supporting the claim of widespread fraud. Unless you have some evidence of some kind, it really seems like you would prefer to believe there is some vast conspiracy and you are writing off all the evidence to the contrary.
When I look for articles explaining why the lawsuits are rejected en mass, every article I have found is very hand wavy, stating the judges are appointed by Trump so we should expect them to be unbiased. However, no one actually dogs into the opinions or takes the reason why the election seems highly suspicious seriously.
To pick out one specific piece of evidence, in PA they found 200k more votes than voters, which is more than enough to change the result for that state. The counts are all from state government databases.
http://www.repdiamond.com/News/18754/Latest-News/PA-Lawmaker...
Navarro has over 50 such claims linked in his report, totalling over 3M potentially fraudulent votes. Regardless of what you think of the man, the evidence itself I find hard to set aside, even though I am like you and would tend towards dismissing Navarro as a partisan hack. But when he has laid out the claimed evidence like this in detail I must at least give it a spot check and the spot checks hold up so far.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-afs:Content:9887147...
You claim that the "spot checks hold up", but the one example you chose to cite (presumably one of the ones you believe holds up) falls apart with just a tiny bit of research.
Incorrect. Voter rolls have information about who voted, and this information is public record. You can simply call up a random sample of recorded 2020 voters in Georgia and ask them to confirm that they voted in the election.
There is no way to undetectably insert additional fake paper ballots (“vote dumps”) unless you are alleging a vast conspiracy that removed the real paper ballots from storage after the election and replaced them with new fake ones, without any whistleblowers on the (Republican-run and Trump-supporting) elections staff speaking out.
UPDATE: I just checked the GA website, and all it gives me is voter IDs and whom they voted for. No way I can verify vote fraud did not occur from that information. No addresses or names.
You cannot simply add ballots to the election as the totals would then be incorrect. (There would be more votes than people recorded as voting)
What is “Vote Dumping”? Do you mean inserting fraudulent paper ballots into the stored ballots to be counted?
The election was recorded on physical paper ballots. Are you alleging a vast conspiracy of bipartisan election workers and Republican Secretary of State monitors to replace the legitimate physical ballots with fake ones?
All ballots were hand counted and the initial Dominion machine count was confirmed accurate, so the allegation would be a conspiracy where Dominion scanners inaccurately counted the original paper ballots, then the paper ballots were secretly replaced with fakes to match the inaccurate Dominion counts? And this would have had to been done state-wide without a single whistleblower. It’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory if you try to write it out.
No, its not.
Either a single actor with appropriate access or multiple independent actors not acting in coordination could effect the theft of an election without any conspiracy.
Conspiracy requires an agreement to work together; that might help with an election theft but it is not “by definition” necessary for election theft.
I would suggest that if you weren’t able to find this information using google, you should think about what that means for your research skills and the skills/knowledge of those who create and propagate the voter fraud lies. Some humility might be in order as to why experts don’t think there was fraud, but others who don’t understand how elections work do....
https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/voter_history_files
“ You will need a voter file in order to associate a voter with his or her voter history. The voter and history files both contain the voter registration number and can be linked on this field.
For more information on voter lists, please send an email to AJackson@sos.ga.gov with the subject “Voter List Files.””
https://www.11alive.com/article/news/verify/verify-can-your-...
“ So is it true your neighbors or friends can find out if you voted? 11Alive verified with the Secretary of State’s website that under Georgia law, “voter registration lists are available to the public and contain the following information: voter name, residential address, mailing address if different, race, gender, registration date, and last voting date.” The information is available by order for a fee on the Secretary of State’s Office website, though is not to be used for commercial purposes.”
However, I would still need a second list of valid addresses for each person to create a true validation.
Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit.
Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
And just because they purchased the assets doesn't mean they just used them without checking them.
We've already seen this happen–when YouTube started putting labels on all COVID-19-related content, deniers were unsatisfied by the sources presented because they have been indoctrinated to believe nothing mainstream can be trusted.
The correct answer is to prevent them from saying things.
They'll use any excuse to delude themselves that they're correct, because to admit otherwise is to admit that they were dumb enough to have been conned by a terrible conman. When they saw the morons attacking congress, they convinced themselves "people wearing helmets are Antifa, and all the attackers are Antifa plants...".
You mean like the Russia hoax?
Voting machines didn’t steal the election. But they’re a terrible technology. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/03/voting-mac...
And worst of all is ES&S' threats against folks who point out those legitimate flaws, e.g. SMART Elections, a journalism and advocacy group in NY.
ESS voting machine company sends threats https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2021/01/11/ess-voting-machine-...
What we need is evidence-based elections:
Evidence-Based Elections: Create a Meaningful Paper Trail, then Audit Andrew W. Appel* & Philip B. Stark* Georgetown Law Technology Review 2020 https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
And though we have improving evidence for correct tabulations in the recent elections, many states still aren't doing a good job providing evidence for ballot eligibility or chain-of-custody.
The best way to promote confidence in our democracy is to calmly stick to facts, not be swayed by politics, and work to make things better. For more on how we've done that in Colorado and elsewhere, see my page at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/corla/
BMO has something similar but it's $6,000. The rest (last time I checked) didn't really offer something like that.
I have some bars of precious metals, and contracts etc.
I'm sure I could avoid using one, for instance getting a fire safe. However since the bank offers it for free, why not use it?
Also, you have the option of offsite storage for any media backups. There is always the "Cloud" however sometimes it's nice to know your wedding photos are in a secure location.
Offsite storage of small, highly value items. Important documents especially (e.g.,.duplicate official copies of birth certificates and similar documents as offsite backup, because getting them from the source can be time consuming, and present chicken and egg problems.)
A prevailing opinion about apples doesn't apply to oranges.
Instead of thinking of them as "voting machines with a paper trail," think of them as "reliable, trustworthy paper ballots that are made clean and uniform using a machine."
The point is that the output is a paper ballot which can be (and often is) hand-counted for auditing and verification purposes. Paper ballots rule.
Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.
This is called a risk-limiting audit.
If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.
In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.
If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.
Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.
why does a municipal voting machine need a weighted race function?
how is chain of custody maintained re usb keys?
why are ballot images not being retained (happened in massachusetts r senate primary)
why do they run on windows 10? lol
The lawsuit is about claims that are straight BS...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
Probably as many as review their grocery store receipts, I'd guess. Which is to say, practically none.
But regardless of the above -- the design change to include printed ballots was a big improvement in security and voter confidence in the election.
The QR code could mis-match the printed ballot on say 5% of the ballots and nobody would notice a thing.
Need a recount? Ok, just run em through again, and they'll read the same (wrong) votes again, no problem.
Only a hand count of the paper ballots would catch the mis-match.
Did that actually happen? I don't know. But if the machines are truly reading a QR code, that seems a glaring flaw regardless.
Because according to what I saw presented in hearings, the reading machines actually read the QR code made by ballot-marking-device, not the human readable portion of the ballot.
If true, that seems an obvious design flaw (to be nice) right there.
Assuming this is true, it would be simple to modify the printing software such that the QR code vote is different from the human readable vote.
A recount, by running the paper ballots through the machine again, would come up with the same result as the first time.
The only way to catch it would be to hand-count the paper ballots and compare the results to the machine counted votes.
Really though, the QR code should be eliminated, so that the voter is able to personally verify what the machine will actually read.
So how are these voting machines complete bullshit exactly? What do you think the mechanism of attack is, and do you have any sources other than just your speculation?
And why on earth does a voting machine require OggVorbis?
https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/...
I have a bridge to sell to anyone who thinks Dominion has actually audited any of these external dependencies.
Do you not remember how problematic the purely paper voting systems were? How many errors were made in the voting and the counts and how long it took to get the final results in close elections? Florida 2000 is a famous, widely-known example. The computers are clearly better.
Also, Florida 2000 is a strange example, considering the present drama. We've only gone from a simple controversy to a more complex one.
Per Bruce Schneier:
> If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems, and you don't understand the technology.
Now let's pretend you don't even give me that receipt, but you just keep it for your own accounting. I later find my $100 isn't in my account. But hey, you have a receipt you printed that says you put it in my account.
If you're honest, this system works. If I can't trust you, then the receipt is meaningless.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/19/us/elections/...
In Floyd county more than 2,000 votes switched sides out of roughly 40,000 votes. So it now has a real world demonstrated error rate of 0.5% which is not insignificant. For example, I would not trust a calculator with a 0.5% error to do my taxes. I wouldn't even us it on an exam.
> Floyd County officials discovered about 2,400 ballots that election workers neglected to rescan after a scanner failed and results could not be retrieved from memory cards. Officials attributed the error to “gross incompetence” on the part of the county’s elections director.
The prevailing opinion of election security professionals is that State election systems should be designed assuming the machines are insecure and the process should be tolerant to that fault.
That's why many states that use electronic voting or tabulation produce a voter verifiable paper trail. That means, when you're done voting the machine gives the voter a piece of paper that has their votes on it. The voter can check the paper to ensure it matches their votes, then deposits the paper record like a ballot.
State's can then use Risk Limiting Audits to verify a necessary amount of randomly sampled ballots to ensure that the electronic count matches the voter verifiable paper ballots.
So, if your concern is that the GA election was overturned by electronic tampering you would need to explain why the voter verifiable paper trail extremely closely matched the electronic tabulation.
This is a long-winded way of saying I agree with you. There are some states that use electronic voting or tabulation without a voter-verifiable paper trail and risk limiting audits. Fortunately, none of those states were "disputed" in this election. But those states should absolutely switch to these kinds of systems.
The identity of the voter is on the outer envelope which is separated from the ballot and destroyed after their signature is checked. An attacker could insert manufactured ballots to be tabulated after this process and there would be no way to know if they are legitimate or not - they’re anonymous now too so you can’t check with the voter and the voter can’t verify their vote.
You can recount the ballots all you want if this attack occurred, because the fake and real ballots would be indistinguishable and unauditable.
It's a criticism of the concept of anonymous ballots, not actually a criticism of mail in voting.
You can't say that without saying how large the sample is. Certainly, if the random sample size is "100% of all ballots" it would be enough.
Risk Limiting Audits take that into account. There's a rigorously backed formula for determining how big the sample size needs to be based on the margin of victory. The closer the election, the more ballots are included in the sample.
In fact, you're right that a _very_ narrow margin requires a random sample that ends up being very nearly or actually all votes.
Georgia is a perfect example of this. Georgia applied a Risk Limiting Audit to the Presidential Election. Because the margin was so close, the RLA required them to sample every single ballot cast. The first "complete hand recount" of Georgia was actually a Risk Limiting Audit.
Here is the GA SOS reporting out the results of that first statewide hand recount: https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
As a made up example: maybe some precincts had scanners that worked 100% perfectly, and some had units that occasionally mis-scanned with a rhythm.
Georgia was the closest percentagewise in 2020. 4935487 votes were cast between Trump and Biden, and the difference was 11779 votes. However, even if Georgia went to Trump, Biden still wins, so you're forced to check states with even larger gaps.
However, even in Georgia, to claim the election should have gone the other way with 99% certainty, it is not hard to check wherever you want. This was done by many groups, for example here [1]. Of course, given the sheer idiocy of Trump followers and news support, they don't educate their supporters on any of this, because the facts destroy their claims.
Since voter records are public in pretty much every state (every one I've looked at over the past few elections let you download them), it's trivial for researchers to do this sampling. They do this every election, and that is how they make the statements they do about the extremely low rates of fraud - they did do the testing.
Trump and co did it too, and found nothing. They had the lists immediately, because they started publishing names they claimed were fraudulent, and in each case the media showed them wrong. So they were looking at the names.
And even with those names, and the ability to sample, they still didn't put forth any solid evidence. Sampling irregularities would have been enough to get more eyes looking. But they knew (just like Trump knew in 2016 with his Clinton 3M illegal votes charade that he eventually dropped) that this is a lie.
[1] https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/3rd_strike_against_vo...
That statement goes against everything I've read about voting in the U.S.A. However, I don't think I have actually read everything. What did you read? Is there a link that I can follow?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
Did the US court system show massive fraud? No. Did they show fraud that wasn't massive but could still have changed the outcome of the election? No.
Were you cheated out of winning the election? A thousand times no.
It was never heard in court. I think that's what people are upset about. If they felt it had its day in court, they would feel differently. Instead, they have the media patting their heads explaining that "it's all fine." Fraud didn't have to be proven; it simply had to be shown to have been possible. The question is whether protections were breached that keep fraud from not being possible.
Listen, I'm a "Bernie Sanders" Progressive. I didn't vote because both candidates were too conservative for me. I don't really have a horse in this race.
That said, this clip shows that the US didn't take its electoral systems seriously. Georgia hasn't applied a security patch since 2012? Really? And you and the entire media are telling me that it wasn't possible when this clip is pretty clear that it wasn't just possible but fairly easy.
It reminds me of when a blockbuster film comes out and it's a stinker, but a lot of money was dropped on it. So there's an effort to make up the opening weekend by having the media sing its praises. "'Cats' is an amazing film!" But it doesn't work. Your strategy isn't working and won't work. The only way forward is to let it have its day in court.
You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like either of them! :-)
It's like a clean room. You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted. There's enough evidence to show that with the existing video and hundreds of witnesses.
The clip I linked to shows that our electoral systems are a train wreck in many states, especially when compared to other countries. (Go watch it.) Now we're screwed. Tens of millions of Americans feel (pretty validly) cheated out of their vote and it has created a no-win situation.
I hate this topic. What are you working on? Any new insights? :-)
States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally.
> You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted.
That is not how law works in the USA or any country that I'm aware of. You have to prove that wrong doing occurred, not prove that wrong doing did not occur. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the defendant. Science works the same way (something is a theory if it can't be disproven, not if it can be proven that it can't be disproven).
State Constitution changes are often controlled by the people, ultimately, not the legislature, which has occasionally been used in Presidential election cases to argue that such State Constitutions cannot constrain regulation of state elections because they are not under the exclusive control of the legislature. The federal courts have, IIRC, consistently and emphatically rejected this logic, though.
I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
A crime is a crime regardless of whether it effects the outcome. It is fairly straightforward to prove that you stuffed a thousand ballets if you actually did that, we just have to show evidence of what you did! It is impossible to prove that you or someone else didn't stuff ballots, because it is logically a possible that it occurred. IE proving existence is something that is possible, proving non-existence is something that is impossible.
> I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.
I'm saying that there is simply no evidence of wrong doing so the courts have nothing to act on. We haven't even made it to the "should the wrong doing invalidate the electoral process" yet.
This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.
The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.
But tribalism still rules, so lots of praise abounds about how well things went. Mostly because their opponent lost.
Frankly, we need publicly auditable records. For some reason we can request practically any non-classified data from the government... but not fine grained, anonymous voting data.
That nobody seems to think this is a problem is... well, not shocking. But when the party that Hacker News largely opposes wins in the future, I bet (hope) there will be calls to improve our infrastructure.
I think maybe that's psychological bias at play and not, say, actual affirmation that the system is resilient, let alone adequate. The number of downvotes I've gotten without a single reply is quite suggestive of this.
Seriously disappointed in this community of some of the most enlightened technical and scientific minds in the world, right now...
But these seem to record on each machine for a quick count the night of, but then also produce a paper ballot for an audit. Much better. It would be even better if the paper ballot was easy for the voter to quickly validate.
But as long as the machine is really just helping you mark a paper ballot, and it's the paper ballot that is "official" end the end, it seems much safer.
Hopefully you can see the problem with that...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svEuG_ekNT0
The paper ballots can then be used for risk limiting hand audit afterwards to verify that the machine count was accurate, or in the case of a close race a full hand recount.
They are forced to sue to prove they are not in the wrong, however that will spun as choosing sides and they could be kicked out when the contract ends. For the cult, this company and the service they provide is just another cog that should be controlled and they will try to get some enabler in there.
If this leads to voting machines being pulled then at least something good came out of it?
Not new. I've had paper voting receipts for at least 15 years. Probably longer.
Is this standard now, or on a state by state basis?
There are no voting machine standards. It varies by state, and in some states by county.
Some people see that as a flaw. I see the diversity of voting systems as a security plus. There was even an article in the newspaper shortly after the election stating that certain foreign governments looked into hacking America's voting systems, but it wasn't worth the effort because they were all constructed and implemented differently.
I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.
Unfortunately this is because they want to believe lies. If they did a small amount of Googling or simply watched a mainstream news source, they’d find that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan all used auditable paper ballots or receipts.
7/8 states that use unverifiable electronic voting machines that don’t have a paper trail went for Trump (e.g. Louisiana). The other is New Jersey, which wasn’t even accused of fraud by Giuliani or Trump.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
Hopefully they improved the security since then...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~matth/lists/
https://ballotpedia.org/Voting_methods_and_equipment_by_stat...
Such analyses are de rigueur in the development of software in regulated industries (medical devices, aviation, etc.)
Should the development of election systems software be regulated?
Votes should be cast in person, with identification and counted by hand.
If Democracy is sacred we can wait a few days for results we can all trust. The system is clearly breaking down today where 75% of Republicans do not trust the election results and 75% of Democrats didn't trust the 2016 election.
The 2004 election also had its fair share of electronic voting criticism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_vo...
What I saw was this. The voter file was completely inaccurate. It was very common to go to a residence where voters:
From my perspective there are real issues with sending unsolicited mail in ballots to homes because the government does such a bad job managing the voter file. Often it is deliberately mismanaged because "purging" a file is a loaded political term. Who wants to be that guy who deletes voters?Moreover, my role as a campaign staffer was to collect votes. Often, people would ask "what do I vote for?", and I would just point and tell them what to vote for. This is also common. It also feels unethical.
Based on this experience, I strongly support voting in person, with an ID.
Don't trust me. If you would like to see this for yourself, volunteer with a campaign (any party) and canvass an apartment building in a swing state.
Shhh, a view like this will get you banned from Twitter... ;)
Before the problem can be addressed it must be acknowledged. Unfortunately, so far I only see finger-pointing and deflection. As far as each respective side is concerned, there's no problem on their end and they have no responsibility. It is all the fault of the others. The only thing that is changing is the increasing intensity of outrage.
To the extent that's true, it has far less to do with voting machines than with self-selected information bubbles.
That's a choice, and very much a part of the self-selection I spoke of.
If their mistrust is based on crazy, there's nothing that can be done to fix it except to cure that crazy.
And I think it's based on crazy: the reasoning seems to break down to: (A) belief that Donald Trump won implying (B) the election must be fraudulent (since it didn't confirm A).
And folks, let's not act like this is the first time voting systems have been scrutinized.
If @antirez is reading this, would love if you could provide any useful insights. FYI, I ask becuase of your background in research and development of "TCP Idle Scan" back in '98.
They are not arguing that it is impossible for such a system to ever be built, they're arguing that their system is not built that way. Voting machines are audited and have a chain of custody, it would be very difficult to argue that "someone could hack all the machines and install this capability" fits within the realm of possibility.
Dominion machines aren't on the internet. Dominion doesn't have centralized access to all of their machines.
Could they eg send out an army of technicians to every voting location and use some insane side-channel attack to physically read and flip bits from across the street? Sure. But by that logic it's also "not impossible" for you or I to launch the US nuclear arsenal.
I think saying that "it is technologically possible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them" is "technically correct" but obviously not actually correct in any reasonable sense.
So it's not just a LAN connection that would be isolated to the network in the voting place (what you'd expect).
They also reported sending out updates to the machines in some precincts after certification, just before the election: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/georgia-election-ma... (not sure of the current veracity of this but bookmarked it as it was interesting).
It's certainly technically possible (which of course it is, if you control the software and access to the machine, you can do what you want).
We had an election here yesterday. Each voter just filled in a pre-printed paper and dropped it into a box. COVID restrictions meant we had up to 10 minute queues depending on time of day, normally it's much faster. Each polling table is self-contained and had less than 1000 votes to count at the end of the day. They're just setup in school buildings on a Sunday when they'd otherwise be empty. Two hours after the election almost all of them had counted their votes, reported them centrally and that was available on a simple website anyone can see. There will be a central recount in a few days as a double check. It never finds any differences. Each of these polling tables is staffed with 5 or 6 people that double check what each of them is doing and makes it so there's a lot of people involved in the election further increasing the trust of the population in the process, because a not insignificant part of them take part. The scaling of the process is embarrassingly parallel so is workable for any size of country or election. I don't get why anyone would want to go through all the trouble of inventing these complex technology solutions to a non-problem that then create these huge attack vectors not only to actually do something nefarious but even more importantly to convince people that that has happened and rile up a mob.
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
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.
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.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-opinion-fede...
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...
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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?
From my perspective, the accusations he made were completely dodged by Dominion and by Democrats (since their guy was labeled the winner by the media). 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.
In this case, the strong argument is very easily legally defensible. It was very clear in context why Rudy was not pleading fraud because it wasn't the point he was making at that time. That's the strongest argument?
So I wonder what exactly is the point of this lawsuit? I'm going to guess given:
This is designed for news.When Rudy asks for discovery, it will either be provided or not. I suspect Dominion does not want to take it that far because any good lawyer can make a case for whatever they want given what discovery they get. The fact of the matter is that a Dominion(? not sure if actually Dominion) machine in Michigan was found (in court) to basically make up numbers, had logs erased for 2020 but not 2016 and a whole whack of stuff that was suspect.
A good lawyer should be able to make a case that it is reasonable to assume the machines were defective if not outright fraudulent in that case.
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."
Fortunately for you (aha!) I actually was not looking at these things. What I found interesting were the following:
Aside from the particulars in 2020, as far as I'm concerned, every single election should be audited to the highest standards possible and I cannot understand why anyone would disagree. This (to me) means adversarial parties trying to convince a third party of their version of the truth with opportunity for rebuttal. I don't feel that actually happened here which worries me overall. What we seem to have is one party says something, the other party takes to the news to offer a rebuttal and no one will be able to fairly hear both sides without piecing together bits of information.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-...
https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-i...
[1] https://depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michi...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
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.
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.
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)
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...
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...
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.
That explains why hand-recounting of ballots wouldn't make a difference. Also, I don't believe signature verification was widely used, or at least wasn't used in the critical swing states where it really mattered. It should be used everywhere considering the technology is mature enough and easily available.
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.
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...
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..
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.
Hint: he won't
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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...
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.
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.
https://airtable.com/shrhYBx2cboqsKv14/tbl0at4AkLpdBFOzp?bac...
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.
Agreed on adults that somehow are now missing or more concerned with their Twitter feeds than their responsibilities.
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.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/497435-pol...
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).
The courts didn’t “entertain” them because of standing. Cases weren’t thrown out on merits. No court has actually heard evidence.
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].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/on_the_merits
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.
> 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).
[0]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/452/394/
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?
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.
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.
In any case I think it’s unlikely that Rudi will be claiming insanity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a court case in Antrim county Michigan a judge allowed an audit, which showed voting machine fraud. You can read the report here:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20423772/antrim-c...
Democrats have in the past pointed out how prone Dominion Voting Systems is to cheating, such as presidial primary nominee Amy Klobuchar that was very critical of it in 2019
https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2019/3/ran...
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25905263
https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20423772-antrim-cou...
In addition they have videos of dominion employees supposedly explaining how to flip votes.
https://thespectator.info/2021/01/04/new-video-shows-dominio...
If you watched the state senate hearings you can see these. Witnesses share their findings. As far as I’m aware Giuliani repeats these, in defense of his client.
Michigan: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eZXkAv7yKgw
Kinda feel like this lawsuit will go no where. Then again politics seem to be all that matter here. We shall see how it plays out, I suspect given the stakes Guiliani will go down.
Frankly, I’ve seen the evidence Guiliani has presented and I find it convincing, at least enough to warrant an investigation. It’s quite surprising the state of things. I urge everyone to do their own research and decide, particularly, watch the state hearings on election fraud.
EDIT: I personally think this is an effort to tie down trumps legal defense team during the impeachment.
Care to share?
See link: http://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Election/2020_Election_Cases.ht...
Many are still active (~30)
Edit: correction
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."
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”.
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.”’
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.
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.
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.
There is a defamation lawyer right in the middle of the "election was stolen" story. Lin Wood.
All of this almost makes me think the Trump-side lawyers ganged up to force this outcome given that Lin Wood presumably knows what he is doing in the business.
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."
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.)
https://securityboulevard.com/2019/09/voting-machines-still-...
I wonder how they debugged the code then
How would this be used against researchers or watchdogs in your opinion?
Researcher: "Your machines have USB ports exposed, can flash firmware, connected to the internet, don't produce an auditable paper trail, and I hacked into a machine personally. 100% secure is demonstrably false."
Voting Machine Company: "Well, a third party verified that it is 100% secure so we're going to sue you (and probably not win) but it will cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend, unless you cease and desist."
If any company comes out and says the product 100% secure, the tech community basically scoffs at them. It's not a good PR strategy for a company anyways. Now, relying on the reputation of another firm through audits is a totally normal way of doing business. This does not compete with researchers, and has by and large included researchers (stuff like Bug Bounty/Responsible Disclosure programs) as a good control. So any researcher looking for this stuff would likely have a protected way to disclose their findings.
Further, this is supported by another compliance body in the SEC via SOX. There has to be a protected whistleblower program for publicly traded companies. So, the ability to disclose security gaps is not neutered in any way by this court case, no matter how it plays out.
That is what makes them legitimate.
https://www.youtube.com/c/RudyWGiuliani/videos
Of all the claims that stuck out to me is the suitcase video, since it time corresponds with a one sided spike of votes.
None of it matters, of course, because realpolitik, and the biggest sin of the viking cosplayers was believing that any of this evidence matters.
Ok but did you look?
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/georgia-election-officia...
edit: rather than downvoting me, please engage with the question so others can learn.
I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
>The ballots were on camera in the room the entire time, if reporters had been sent home they still wouldn't have appeared out of a mystery suitcase. They were sealed on camera, then unsealed on camera, and counted on camera. They have been counted and recounted and recounted.
Here are the sworn affidavits that state the observers were too far to monitor what was being done with the boxes when they were brought in during the day [0].
>I don't know if reporters were "sent home" as you are claiming, or if they "left" as described by this video when election employees were initially closing up for the night, but either way the monitors and media saw those ballots go into the boxes and Giuliani was still lying about where they came from.
Here are the sworn affidavits of two poll watchers that say they were sent home [1]. This corroborates what David Shafer says happened that night [2]. Also ABC news reported the same, their source was Regina Waller [3].
================
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.284055...
[1] https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20420331-mitchell-h...
[2] https://twitter.com/DavidShafer/status/1325956840769859586?r...
[3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pipe-bursts-atlanta-arena-ca...
What the state investigator says, and what those affidavits both appear to agree with, is
> Nobody told them to stay. Nobody told them to leave. Nobody gave them any advice on what they should do. And It was still open for them or the public to come back in to view at whatever time they wanted to, as long as they were still working.
I’m going to give more credence to the affidavits of the people who were directly involved over the wording from ABC.
One of them did return later and was allowed in, but arrived as the counting was complete.
It’s an unfortunate situation that everyone was told it was closing down and then the secretary of state’s office called to tell them to keep counting, but that doesn’t support Giuliano’s claims about rigging the election with suitcases of ballots from under a table.
It seems the reason they thought they were done counting is because a supervisor told the counters to go home, and said that they were done counting for the day.
Relevant part from the linked document (paragraph 8):
"Sometime after 10 o'clock p.m., the counting activity slowed. Shortly afterward, a younger lady with long braided but blond hair yelled out to all of them they should stop working and come back tomorrow (the next day, Wednesday November 4th) at 8:30 A.M.. Thereafter, all but 4 election employees left State Farm, leaving just the blond haired lady (who Michelle and I assumed was the supervisor), two older ladies and Regina Waller at the location. This lady had appeared through the night and Michelle and I believed her to be the supervisor."
I think that while it is possible the observers could have just stayed there until everyone left, it is likely that they believed what they were told -- that the counting would finish the next day.
At any rate, it is at best a bad look. I agree that it doesn't prove fraud or anything close. It does, however, look suspicious and IMHO warrants further investigation.
The only thing the statement adds is that they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. That is not the same thing as having observers. Even North Korea investigates its own elections and concludes that it does nothing wrong.
With the whole thing being on camera and knowing that no secret ballot suitcases were smuggled in, are we to believe that in the absence of observers they somehow rigged the counting machines to mis-scan these ballots, even though the hand recount for Fulton only differed from the initial count by 0.07%?
There's no need to believe the suitcases were smuggled in, although you yourself appear to have doubts in that direction. For example, they could be perfectly authentic ballots with some flawed provenance. A priori this seems the most plausible explanation.
> rather than simply having left.
Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
But the provenance is on camera. Those ballots were right there with the rest of them. What exactly is the “auditing” you think the observers would have done that the Republican secretary of state’s staffer didn’t do?
Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But then why is it called “SuitcaseGate”? Does “StandardContainerOfAbsenteeBallotsGate” not have the same deliberately made implication?
Beyond that, I don’t disagree that poll observers are important. But the ballots at this point had already been removed from both of their envelopes and stacked for scanning, while the observers were all present. If there was a flawed provenance to them, the observers observed it. At the point where those ballots were taken out of the box and scanned (again, all on camera) they’re nothing but pieces of paper with some bubbles filled in.
There’s no name. There’s no date. There’s no voter address. There’s no signature. Just ballots. Any questions of their provenance could only have been addressed earlier when they were taken out of their envelopes under the supervision of the election observers.
So with no observers present, they were pulled back out of the boxes and fed through the scanner. What did the observers need to observe that wasn’t captured on the surveillance tape? What part of this unobserved scanning process can’t be confirmed by a recount of the same ballots?
> Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.
The Mitchell Harrison affidavit linked by another commenter specifically explains that he and Trevin McKoy came back that night and were escorted into the building. Counting had stopped before they arrived, but the point stands you’re bullshitting about it “having the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening.”
Your whole argument boils down to "there's no need for observers because I trust the process". The whole point of observers is that it shouldn't be necessary to just trust the process. Right now what you and the media and HN are telling me, on pain of cancellation, is that 100% of the essentially self-selected people involved in the election are honest. That all of the dishonest people decided it was too much bother to do a day's work to influence the outcome of the election, because The Process is infallible. I guess I should be thankful that all the dishonest people didn't bother voting either, right?
When they arrived at the front door they were told counting had already been completed. Not sure whether you misread that or are suggesting the security person was lying about what was happening inside.
> They were told to leave because counting was complete,
They were told counting was complete, they were not told to leave, and they do not claim they were told to leave. But I can't blame them for making that assumption.
> then when they came back (due to a tip, not an invitation)
Agree with you here, when the secretary of state's office called and told them to resume counting, some effort should have been made to get the observers back in.
But the only work done was scanning of ballots that had already been cleared, and it was all on camera, and all of the work they did while unobserved can be directly confirmed by recounts. So even though this happened, I don't see how it's evidence that the election was rigged.
> they were delayed at the door until all activities they wished to observe had ceased.
Having arrived at the front door after counting was finished, the one guard at the door stayed at the door instead of leaving his post, and he radioed someone else. The second person escorted them in, where they confirmed that yes, counting had ceased as they were told.
Is there a couple minute window in there where you could say "the second person took too long and was stalling to cover something?" Sure, allow me to flex my creative writing muscles to concoct a reverse-heist in which this could actually matter and have affected the election:
1) The (democratic leaning) Fulton County election officials shut down counting for the night and allowed observers to leave.
2) Observers having been cleared, they colluded with the (republican) secretary of state's office to arrange a cover to resume scanning ballots.
3) They then used the unobserved counting session as an excuse to unseal the boxes under the table of verified but uncounted ballots.
4) Having these containers of ballots open, they hacked the security cameras to cover their activities.
5) The footage we've seen was actually recorded in a replica of the ballot counting room that they built in a warehouse last October, and the people seen counting ballots on it are all actors.
6) With the cameras hijacked and no observers present, they introduce and count fake ballots that did not actually come from the previously observed and sealed boxes.
7) Steal election!
I don't have the full quality video recording or the forensic knowledge to analyze it, but as conspiracy theories go I don't find my scenario particularly compelling.
> This isn't getting any better!
If you say so.
Ralph was in charge at State Farm Arena when those videos were filmed.
Edit: yes, I called him and we spoke back in December for about 30-45 minutes. I originally called about the barriers blocking observers during the recount and then asked about the suitcases as well.
I saw the obvious issue with this and called to ask why. His response was that "legally we're in compliance."
https://twitter.com/_HeatherWalker/status/132408570469203149...
Wherein people posted views from the other side of the glass claiming they were trying to count the votes in secret or something. Which was ironic, given all the news crews and observers on the other side of the glass documenting the same thing.
I agree that its BS to keep observers so far back that they cannot meaningfully observe the counting.
However, if anyone else is actually interested in an explanation of this incident from the people in charge of the election, check out this 60 Minutes clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjKXvqSNIkk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUtmBrgIC9w
But you can also watch his commentary on the suitcase video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PchtaUsRH70&t=1s
You can just sort of skim that. He made dozens of fact-specific allegations over the course of months (ie. not carefully phrased).
So my question is this: How much of those auditable trails have actually been audited, in what places, and in what numbers (I don't think spot checks will suffice to reassure people, the numbers need to be a statistically significant percentage in the most contested places), and, more importantly where are the results of these audits being published?
Even after the hand-count clearly confirmed that the machines had not switched any votes, Guiliani spread the same lie. This is actually documented in the suit.
Mind you, it is not that the vote-tally machines leave a paper audit trail. The vote-tally machines work by scanning the actual paper ballots.
Ah ty, this is what I was wondering, I figured the outrage was mostly posturing but still want to approach the issue outside of that drama. I mostly want to see where the audit results are published.
There is enough affidavits, and statistical anomalies to warrant an investigation. And until there is one, anyone is free to claim voter fraud. But nonetheless all comments claiming fraud to be tangentially possible are getting destroyed. Even though the media has been bragging how easy is to hack a voting machine after Trump 2016 win. After 20 million for "Russia collusion" which was badly founded, and resulted in not much, is there nothing to investigate this election? Or would it be too embarrassing?
Until there is an investigation, there is no "misinformation", people should be free to express doubt, and support allegations of voter fraud.
That certainly doesn't follow, and neither does the flipped implication that it wouldn't be reasonable for someone to make a good faith claim of voter fraud after such an investigation.
I'm not sure what to call this type of fallacy-- perhaps "phantom goal posts?"
An allegation of rape can be misinformation but it probably has to be investigated first? You shouldn't just call it misinformation without backing it up.
2. After an investigation you can still make claims, but you would be more liable to lawsuits. Or, in an online discussion, it would be more probable that you would be wasting everyone's time. e.g. people that keep insisting Trump works for Russia. For that we have conspiracy forums.
Your comment was completely unnecessary. I'm not sure what to call it, perhaps "the phantom footbal referee"
Even broadly speaking, there are two separate buckets for each claim:
1. allegations of voter fraud supported by evidence (circumstantial or otherwise)
2. wild allegations of voter fraud
3. allegations of fair election results supported by evidence (circumstantial or otherwise)
4. wild allegations of fair election results
There were myriad examples of #2 circulating around the election, many debunked even before they started to spread more widely. I see no reason to call these claims anything other than misinformation.
Given the incentives for each party after the initial vote tally of the election, there happened to be a lot more examples of #2 than anything else. But the exact same logic applies to #4, esp. in authoritarian countries where that kind of misinformation is more common.
Edit: typo
1) A block function so we could cut the massively-upvoted, one-sided comments and get to the impartial or contrary information buried underneath them.
2) A "unfade" button to see the massively-downvoted comments.
I've generally found when threads take on this imbalanced and highly-polarised state, the stuff on the top isn't the cream.
The tone of "I see no reason.. limited value" seems a bit condescending to what appears to be a sizable portion of HN that values intelligent debate, and there can be no debate with only one viewpoint.
It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.
Agreed.
> It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.
Fair point, but in a flame war, HN runs a risk of having a one-sided discussion. Of course, some people believe that the losers in any particular forum should be silenced, because the majority view must be correct.
But to your point, if you can't convince someone of the value of your contribution then perhaps it just isn't valuable. Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
I agree, and the oblique War Games reference is appreciated.
> Do you believe all opinions and expressions of those opinions are equally valuable and require equal advertisement?
(Who would believe such a thing? Well, I guess there was the FCC Fairness Doctrine, but fortunately that's gone.)
Of course not all opinions are equally valuable, but an echo chamber of people parroting the party line also has no value. In fact, that has negative value to me; I'd prefer a cacophony of divergent opinions to a single narrative.
I'd just like to see the top 10 or 20 comments instead of the top single comment.
Are you sure you're arguing about something that's an actual real problem here?
.. that is, consensus, at least in that particular forum. But losers still shouldn't be silenced.
The only times I've ever been downvoted excessively, I've deserved it.
"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."
"I think it's nuts for a modern democracy to allow for anything but open source software being used to count paper ballots with chain-of-custody records, voter ID validation, biometric markings, and redacted ballots being published on the web for all to view and count independently."
"I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy"
It's the definition of polarisation, entirely one-sided views, and each side demonstrably not thinking impartially. The first and third threads are largely echo-chambers with heavily-downvoted opposing views (which are often reasonable). All threads have some useful discussion, but its divisive opposite comes in seemingly combative/reactive waves that are stark in their coordination.
A community rooted in computer security (and AI) shouldn't be reliant on the naive idea that each anonymous online forum account represents one real person.
The suggestions made initially might go some way toward mitigating harm resultant from this reality of our current internet, which - thus far, almost exclusively for some specific political matters - HN seems to pointedly ignore.
It is starkly obvious to frequent visitors when comment threads deviate from this norm into highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless and yet miraculously-synchronised agenda. That this only occurs pertaining to particular topics, and reliably so, reveals to incumbent readership that those engaging in this activity, whilst possibly attempting to blend in, are actually standing naked in full view.
Indeed, in some cases this ineptitude suggests a low level of social awareness possibly consistent with that of a language model.
Regardless, tools to assist genuine readers in filtering such content and reversing its own filtering is a suitable mitigation, largely without negative side-effects.
For technical subjects. If you want a good conversation about politics, you should go where those experts are.
> yet miraculously-synchronised agenda.
Hey look, a conspiracy theory! As for highly-polarised, emotional and often baseless, you'll find that wherever politics are discussed from forums to the dinner table. There's no point in adding tools so people can create their own bubbles inside of off-topic discussions.
The stance that this is not worthwhile and that no measures should be employed to mitigate it is negligent at best.
True, but only if there's more than one thread on the page.
I feel that open sourcing their code would definitely do the trick. It is kinda baffling that something as important as an election is ran on closed-source proprietary codebase.
Well now they'll have to do exactly that in a courtroom. I can't think of a better place for it.
Why would their code matter? Far more important than the code is the paper ballot audit trail their machines produce.
And that audit trail has been audited by multiple states, run by both Republicans and Democrats, after the election and found to be flawless. The machines counted properly. https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...
Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. Democrats are perfectly happy to spend even more money to “prove” their wins are real (although it’s actually mostly solid Republican states that use insecure voting machines that don’t have a paper trail and should be forced to upgrade).
Thank you!!! There are tons of people who have spent their entire lives thinking about computer voting. Their recommendations are almost uniformly:
1. Dear god no.
2. If so, paper trail.
Looking at the source code when there's an auditable paper trail is a huge idiotic red herring. And, there is an auditable paper trail.
All right dstola: For the purposes of argument, I accuse you of being a thief who has embezzled millions of dollars from some company you've worked for. Instead of suing me for defamation for my lie, why don't you just prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you didn't steal anything? Maybe you could open source your bank account data, and all your movements to show that you couldn't have opened any secret accounts?
That's a ridiculous ask. The malicious accusation of embezzled is a lie that harmed you, and proving your innocence won't compensate you for the harm caused by that lie. These lawsuits are about the harm done to Dominion.
Also, no analysis of any kind would ever satisfy the people who believe the 2020 election was marred by vote fraud. That belief isn't based on evidence, and massive amounts of evidence to the contrary hasn't convinced those people. There's no reason to think one more report would make any difference.
Actually, maybe not open source, but otherwise that is exactly what would happen should I be suspect of being a thief. No reason why dominion cannot show their source code to professional investigators to get their name cleared right? If they are so vocal about being innocent, why not do it?
Imagine how much we could cut out.