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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> . 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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.
"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.
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% .
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.
