The Arizona case was denied essentially because the affidavits were declared hear-say, because the testimony wasn't provided during court. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't make sense to me.
First, it took weeks to document their testimony - it would likely take further weeks to basically re-do their testimony in court / depositions.
Second, if it was so important that their testimony be sworn in to his court, why dismiss the case entirely, instead of just allowing the plaintiff to bring the witnesses to the stand?
It's pretty easy to dismiss a case as "having no evidence" when you ignore the 100's of affidavits as hear-say. Sure, it's not sworn testimony in court, but to automatically assume every one of them is lying, is a bit of a stretch.
Another rationale that has been used to dismiss cases is that evidence that the law was broken is not evidence that fraud that took place.
It's pretty much beyond dispute at this point that in several states, credentialed Republican poll observers were not allowed to do their job in a meaningful way - contrary to state law. (referring to MI/PA)
When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight, those ballots should be thrown out. Not because its proof that fraud happened, but it is proof that the controls to prevent fraud were not in place (that were legally required to be in place).
"No evidence of widespread fraud", is true. But what is also true, is that there are mountains of evidence of election laws that were ignored/broken, that in a fair election, would result in those ballots being thrown out.
> "This court has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens."
That's his opinion and he's entitled to it, but it's not a universal truth that illegal ballots can't be thrown out. Judges have thrown out ballots before. Judges have even thrown out elections even after the candidate is sworn into office.
> Perhaps it's merely a partisan tactic.
Make no mistake about it, this is a hugely partisan issue. The "Left" is convinced beyond doubt that Trump is trying to overturn the election. The "Right" is convinced beyond doubt that the election was a fraud.
When the truth of a subject is determined largely by what party you associate with, it's pretty clear to me that there aren't any objective parties in this discussion.
I don't vote (its against my code of ethics; see Voluntaryism) and I don't associate with any party, so I believe I am about as objective as you can reasonably expect to find on this topic.
> "mountains of it!" rather than specifics is hand-waving gish-galloping stuff.
I'm happy to provide evidence to anything I've claimed.
Most of the evidence I have heard is from the many hours of testimony I have watched from the state legislature hearings (PA, MI, GA, AZ). Links can be found online.
>Judges have even thrown out elections even after the candidate is sworn into office.
And those judges were probably presented solid evidence that amounted to more than conspiracy and hand waving.
So far Trump and co are something like 1 win, 50 losses, from judges all over the country, local, federal, Supreme Court, GOP and Dem appointed, Trump appointed (who incredibly dismissed the Trump nonsense with prejudice, which is quite rare, and signals just how ridiculous the Trump suits are).
So don't use a false equivalence. There is none here.
I watched the entirety of the Michigan legislature hearing. I heard the affiants speak. Each one provided testimony with a consistent pattern: the Republican poll observers were harassed, kicked out, and not allowed to do their job. This would be in direct violation of state law (http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(d3swxbgf3srsrnw20ak5uthw))/...).
Nowhere in the judgement does the judge address the affidavits. The footnote for that statement (6) just calls it a "conspiracy theory" without addressing the substance of the affidavits at all.
This is generally the case for most of the judgements I have read. Other judgements are denied based on technicalities/standing.
Not a single judgement I have read has addressed the actual substance of the affidavits that have been provided.
First, the thing you linked calling a judgement is not a judgement. It's a filing by Trump's team.
The affidavits are smoke and mirrors. There is no reason to believe what is in them is true - the point of the case is that the plaintiff has to demonstrate they are true, and this was not done. In fact, so many of the Trump lawsuits were ridiculous, that Trump and co dropped them right as they were about to reach trial.
The particular case you list has all filed documents here [1]. The entire court hearing is archived on C-SPAN here [2].
>This is in direct contradiction to the affidavits that were provided
Affidavits are not fact. Repeat that to yourself until you get it. Affidavits are not fact. Stop believing them simply because they sound good to you.
If you honestly listened to the court case, you'd recall, as is clear on the C-SPAN recordings I linked, that this affidavit was hearsay, and inadmissible as evidence for this type of action. This is law 101. This is precisely why affidavits are not fact - they must be demonstrated. It's trivial in a nation of 320 million people to find a person willing to sign an affidavit for anything. However that does not make unicorns real nor does it overturn an election.
Hearsay has no bearing on a case requesting this outcome. The judge was even very, very lenient on asking over and over why this was not simply hearsay, and the lawyers kept trying to avoid answering, and they wobbled all over the place. It's actually embarrassing to have to watch them get caught with their pants down.
This is also why so many reputable lawyers dropped out of this on Trump's side - his requests are nonsense, and will eventually get lawyers disbarred for such a joke. Those firms know they want business in the future and cannot professionally afford to blow up their firms for this nonsense.
From a scan of the testimony, the judge in MI ruled well - Trump demonstrated zero fraud. If he wants to disenfranchise voters he needs to demonstrate actual fraud, not cry and tout conspiracies.
Now, if there was large scale fraud, Trump could easily prove it (I'll explain how researchers can check there is no widespread fraud in a moment). Trump also knows this, but his followers apparently are too dumb to do so.
Every state has a list of who voted; some states make the list public. All states provide the lists for researchers and groups like Trump's team.
If you claim there is, say, 5% fraud somewhere, get that list, sample say 500 people randomly on the list, send pollsters out to make those people voted. If 5% of votes are not real people, then you'd expect 25 people on your list to not exist, or similarly.
Trump has already tried this - you can tell because his team keeps releasing names of people they claim are dead but voted, and so far in each case the media has located the actual person and shown Trump wrong. So out of the tens millions of votes they have looked into, just like researchers do, they have found at most a few cases they questioned.
How do you think they get those names? They do exactly this, see there is no demonstrable fraud, then launch this 3rd rate legal circus, which is solely designed to grift money from gullible rubes.
So far that has worked to the tune of about $200M, enough to help Trump with his legal problems once out of the Whitehouse.
So - stop posting this goofy crap - it has no bearing on reality, and that has been demonstrated over 50 times around the US so far.
Trump's lawyers knew this, but brought it anyways for the theatre of it all.
This is not the action of a man who wants to win and has evidence. This is a con man running up support to raise money from his rubes WITH ALL CAPS PLEAS FOR HELP, only to take their donations and pocketing them.
My position, is that Trump has indeed failed to prove fraud.
But I do think that Trump has collected a preponderance of evidence that election laws were broken. Many affidavits have been provided that substantiate this.
> Hearsay has no bearing on a case requesting this outcome. The judge was even very, very lenient on asking over and over why this was not simply hearsay, and the lawyers kept trying to avoid answering, and they wobbled all over the place.
I can't speak to why Trump's legal team hasn't deposed more witnesses and gotten more sworn testimony. On this I am in complete agreement, it seems negligent. I can only speak to the evidence I have heard, and my reaction to it as a person, and not as a lawyer.
From a legal perspective, Trump's case may indeed have no basis. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know.
But I do know that there are hundreds of affidavits alleging that elections laws were broken, and very few people seem to be taking that seriously. Whether Trump wins or loses, I honestly & genuinely do not care (he lost; that horse has left the barn long ago). But I am disturbed by the ease to which people dismiss these claims, given that there is a substantial number of people providing the testimony, they seem to be genuine of character, and for most of them - their claims do seem to have merit (ethical merit, if not legal).
Even if their claims don't have legal merit, they should at least have ethical merit. Regardless of what a person thinks about Trump, there are honest people who are providing honest testimony about wrongdoing - and their claims and the people who give them voice, are dismissed with outright hostility & vitriol.
>I do think that Trump has collected a preponderance of evidence that election laws were broken
If so, but he has demonstrated zero fraud, then there is no reason to change a single vote. In each case he is asking for votes to be changed, so such cases are not granted.
The majority of places his team has claimed laws were broken have been shown to be false. There's ample places judges have called his team out on this.
That is the point.
>Below is one such piece of evidence:
That claim was pretty thoroughly demolished in the case and in the replies to that comment. This is not evidence. Again you mistake hearsay for evidence.
It's easy to find people willing to claim all sorts of nonsense. Courts demand evidence to prove a fact, and the standard is usually "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> their claims and the people who give them voice, are dismissed with outright hostility & vitriol
No, in every case I followed, the people with these "voices" were shills brought up to sow confusion. Case after case the voices were shown to not have standing, to not be reliable, several recanted before going to trial, and on and on. This is not an honest enterprise of honest people with legit concerns.
The evidence to this is the sheer brutality of the case outcomes - last I looked it was around 58-1 against Trump and co.
This is why there is hostility and vitriol. It's not an honest set of lawsuits being brought (again, just look how idiotic the cases are being run, and how much money has been raised on these cases, and that the money is going to Trump's pockets, not to cases, and you'll see how this machine works).
> If I'm understanding your position correctly, its basically that the people providing testimony are all liars?
Yes? You seem to be pushing the line that this is all sincere and done in good faith, and ignoring the easily noticeable conclusion that it is a performance from bad actors for obvious selfish ends. So much so that your own good faith is questionable. Creating alt accounts to continue the spam doesn't help.
> cases being dismissed is likewise not evidence of that.
I disagree. I put it to you that it is closely related.
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
>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.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures certified results submitted by that date can’t be challenged by Congress, will make it harder for outstanding cases to succeed.
> Each one provided testimony with a consistent pattern: the Republican poll observers were harassed, kicked out, and not allowed to do their job.
And I'm sorry that you take this laughable stuff at face value. The bullshit asymmetry principle means that I don't have the free time to dig into that; and if I did, I would not spend it on you.
Again: the election is over and it wasn't close. This "The South will rise again" stuff would be pitiful if it wasn't so nasty.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN and especially please don't be a jerk to others, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We're trying for something different here.
> When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight
which is itself BS.
and then swaps in:
> illegal ballots
This conflation is not a good faith argument.
> The "Right" is convinced beyond doubt that the election was a fraud.
I know this. It's a problem. The prediction "If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." turned out to be very true. It's not deeper than that.
> The "Left" is convinced beyond doubt that Trump is trying to overturn the election.
Who doesn't? If he isn't trying (badly but nonetheless) to overturn the elections, then what on earth _even are_ these nutty lawsuits? The idea that they exist and are an attempt to change the outcome of the election should not be up for debate. I mean, do you disagree about the existence of them? You think it's an attempt to order from McDonalds maybe?
Specific claim:
During the counting at the TCF Center in Michigan, Republican poll watchers were denied their legal right to meaningful observation. This resulted in many hours of counting without oversight, with hundreds of thousands of ballots counted during this time. This was in violation of state law:
That link mostly addresses Texas lack of standing to challenge PA's elections, which I am in agreement with - Texas does not have standing here. I would be more interested in a source that addresses the specific claims being made in the Texas lawsuit. I reference the Texas lawsuit only as a useful document, as it has a fairly well summarized list of complaints for each state.
> I've seen the quality of such that you provide elsewhere in this thread, I don't see the point in you doing this again.
No problem. I am genuinely interested in seeing an honest refutation of the claims being made by these witnesses. The judges haven't provided that. The media most certainly hasn't. From the replies on HN here, only 1 or 2 people have attempted to provide constructive information. The rest, very similar to yours, is primarily ad hominem and casual dismissal.
If you do have something productive to add, that would correct my perspective in a constructive way, I am genuinely eager to hear it.
it was "not credible" (1), it was thrown out of court, the end.
Move on. Accept that the election is over and it didn't go your way. That's what happens in democracies. The only question, is, is the USA still a democracy?
For the specific claim that we are discussing (poll challengers being kicked out at TCF), his ruling does not address the substantial number of affidavits that were provided.
The only place in the document where he addresses the meaningful observation issue, is in page 8, where he considers just one of the plaintiff's affidavits. Many affidavits on this issue were provided, with testimony to the effect that Republican observers were not allowed to do their job, kicked out, and they were not allowed to replaced. There is testimony that the Republican observers that were removed, were replaced with Democrat observers, resulting in many tables having 2 Democrat observers at the same table, and no Republicans.
The vast majority of the issued in these affidavits were not addressed by the judge. The closest that Judge Kenny came to addressing the above is with the below quote from page 8:
> Democratic party challenger David Jaffe and special consultant Christopher Thomas in their affidavits > both attest to the fact that neither Republican nor Democratic challengers were allowed back in during > the early afternoon of November 4th.
First off, this is 2 affidavits, compared to the dozens of affidavits that were provided by the plaintiff.
Second, it doesn't address at all the issue of Republican observers being kicked out. It only addresses the issue of observers not being allowed back in. It also does not address the imbalance of Democrat/Republican observers.
For this specific claim that we are discussing, dozens of affidavits simply were not addressed. This judge, as did the judge prior, simply ignored the vast majority of affidavits without addressing them. And then labelled the entire case as "not credible".
Again - we are discussing a specific claim (by your suggestion), so I would very much like to see where these specific claims/affidavits are deemed "not credible."
Outside of this specific claim we are discussing, I'm curious if you think this woman is similarly "not credible"? The issue that she is outlining seems pretty illegal to me with very little room for interpretation. Other witnesses made similar claims as well.
> The vast majority of the issued in these affidavits were not addressed by the judge.
You're missing a fundamental point: anyone can make wild, nonsensical claims. it is not for the judge to "refute" them, it is for the plaintiff to substantiate them. Prove your claims or walk. They walked.
I don't know why you nod along with this, or why you think you know better than the judge while making such basic errors. But that is your issue.
prucomaclu: Shame on you, and shame on Texas. You LOST the Civil war, and you FAILED to start another one. Trump and Texans are such Anti-American sore losers. No slaves for you!
Republican congressman rips Texas GOP for suggesting secession and says 'my guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no'
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Friday criticized the Texas GOP for floating the idea of secession after the Supreme Court rejected a bid to overturn the results of the presidential election.
In a statement, the Texas GOP chairman suggested that "law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution."
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the statement should be immediately retracted and the people involved fired. "My guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no," he said.
First, it took weeks to document their testimony - it would likely take further weeks to basically re-do their testimony in court / depositions.
Second, if it was so important that their testimony be sworn in to his court, why dismiss the case entirely, instead of just allowing the plaintiff to bring the witnesses to the stand?
It's pretty easy to dismiss a case as "having no evidence" when you ignore the 100's of affidavits as hear-say. Sure, it's not sworn testimony in court, but to automatically assume every one of them is lying, is a bit of a stretch.
Another rationale that has been used to dismiss cases is that evidence that the law was broken is not evidence that fraud that took place.
It's pretty much beyond dispute at this point that in several states, credentialed Republican poll observers were not allowed to do their job in a meaningful way - contrary to state law. (referring to MI/PA)
When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight, those ballots should be thrown out. Not because its proof that fraud happened, but it is proof that the controls to prevent fraud were not in place (that were legally required to be in place).
"No evidence of widespread fraud", is true. But what is also true, is that there are mountains of evidence of election laws that were ignored/broken, that in a fair election, would result in those ballots being thrown out.