> All they wanted were real audits of the election
So the actual audits done in response to the proper challenges under proper statutory authority that did not find that there was anything sufficiently wrong to overturn the results of the election (and, in many cases, concluded that there wasn't even anything wrong in the first place) are not real audits?
Having actually read several of the lawsuits filed (mostly those after the Texas v Pennsylvania suit), I can tell you that almost none of those lawsuits actually called for a real audit of the election. They actually called for annulling the results of the election in various ways. Many of them didn't even allege voter fraud, and a few specifically denied allegations of voter fraud. If the people filing these lawsuits said they only wanted real audits of the election in media statements, they are fucking liars.
There was no paper ballot recount in Georgia. They recounted the images of the ballots, so if the videos of them getting run through 7 times are true, we wouldn't know. If they released the images, which GA said they would do, we could see the same serial numbers repeated. They've refused to.
They only counted the images, so they can't know - but if they just release the images you can know?
Did you reflect on this statement at all?
Fuck, you're on a programming forum, so I'm assuming you can do simple boolean logic.
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I have a large family in GA. They predominately vote republican. Most of them DO NOT LIKE Trump. He's fucked several members of my family over financially (China imports a boatload of pecans, if you weren't aware. We grow pecans).
I have two diehard republican uncles - Neither voted for Trump in this election. One because he watched his mother (my grandmother) die of covid while trump was still spouting off how small a deal it was. The other because he doesn't think his company will survive another 4 years of the China trade war.
The ground truth, and I'm on the fucking ground here, is that GA was already not inclined to favor Trump in this election.
Add record Black/Minority turnout and it's pretty clear why the state went the way it did.
Hell, I normally vote split ticket on local elections, but not this year.
Yet you come in here and spout off bullshit to try to tell me how my local state should continue to audit and audit and audit until magically the results change to what you want? Get the fuck out of here.
Between this, "you lie" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25675365), and "shut the fuck up" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673632) you broke the site guidelines so egregiously that I decided to ban you. You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Being right doesn't make it ok to take this community further into hellflames.
Moreover, we've had to warn you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21162256. I'm currently banning so many accounts that have built up track records of abusing HN that it would be easiest to just add one more.
However, I looked at your commenting history and it's mostly quite good, so instead I'm going to put this down as an episode of going on tilt under pressure (it happens to all of us) and just ask you to please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not sink to this kind of the thing in the future.
Every single case got struck down by judges. People were pissed about a lack of election transparency that wasn't actually there. If the opinion of judges wasn't enough to convince them, what makes you think that of an auditor would make a difference?
I think the truth will eventually come out. I HOPE that those claiming sufficient fraud to effect the election are dead wrong. The alternative would be a nightmare. That's why the media and big tech shouldn't have buried their head in the sand.
"Every single case got struck down by judges" is not a new argument to my ears. Do you think most of those judges heard actual evidence, or were throwing cases out on procedural grounds? Have you considered that question?
Has Matt Braynard's work been heard and responded to?
I think 90% of all these concerns are likely to be dismisable. But they haven't even been examined, and I have a deep and abiding fear of the remaining 10% actually having merit.
Courts have very specific rules about what constitutes legally admissible evidence. The plaintiff may cry "We have evidence!", but that doesn't mean they have legally admissible evidence. Before the judge will bother to hear the evidence, it has to clear that bar.
IIRC, there was an election case in Pennsylvania that made it up to the Federal appeals court. There it was dismissed for lack of evidence. (The opinion was written by a judge appointed by Trump.) You can think of that as "procedural grounds" and "not hearing the evidence", I suppose, but to me it looks like examining the evidence and finding it lacking at the most basic level.
>"Every single case got struck down by judges" is not a new argument to my ears. Do you think most of those judges heard actual evidence, or were throwing cases out on procedural grounds? Have you considered that question?
Yes. And I even read complaints filed, responses to those complaints, arguments and rulings. And you can too (here's a summary of many of the cases, with links and citations to the actual court documents)[0].
I could tell you what conclusions I drew, but I won't. Don't believe me or anyone else. Read the court documents yourself. They are matters of public record.
I believe that releasing that data would be in contravention of GA state law.
> It was a Settlement Call,
That is a lie. If it were a settlement call, there should have been lawyers from all parties involved. All of the live cases in Georgia regarding the election have Marc Elias present as co-intervenor, and that he was not on the call means that it cannot legally be a settlement call: https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1345887358101688320
> The participation of counsel for Plaintiff in that call appears to be in violation of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 4.2, as Plaintiff’s counsel neither notified litigation counsel for Defendant Raffensperger nor sought nor obtained consent to conduct or participate in a conversation with Defendant Raffensperger.
In my ranking of authorities to trust, I will trust a lawyer involved with the actual underlying litigation over a random internet person, even if the latter is also a lawyer.
Marc Elias says it can't be a settlement call because he would have to be on it, and as someone who is actually involved in the case, that is pretty strong evidence that requires more than a random youtube video by someone who I know absolutely nothing about.
Also, by the way, from the actual call, it appears that Trump is committing a crime on the call, by attempting to get a government official to break the law. (There is an active investigation in Georgia on this matter, I believe). I believe that doing so violates any claims to attorney-client privilege, which would remove any illegality from leaking this call even were it a settlement call (which I do not concede that it is).
This is Robert Barnes, a distinguished civil rights lawyer, who has taken on several Federal Cases, and is currently on the Trump legal team and in a Federal building with other Republican lawyers yesterday and has met with Trump personally. He's not some random lawyer. He's got a distinguished career and has earned my respect.
> Also, by the way, from the actual call, it appears that Trump is committing a crime on the call, by attempting to get a government official to break the law
I don't think you've listened to the full call. It's an hour long and I have. If you had, you would have noted Georgia officials said there was no issue with ballots of dead people cast (they said this was legal) and the context of the 4 minute clip is totally wrong.
Brad Raffensperger: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.
We talked to the congressmen and they were surprised. But they -- I guess, there's a person
named Mr. Brainard that came to these meetings and presented data and he said that there was
dead people. I believe it was upward of 5,000. The actual numbers were two. Two. Two people that
were dead that voted. And so that's wrong. That was two.
If he's discussing Matt Braynard's data, that data doesn't have strong indications of dead people voting being an issue.
It does present a compelling argument that really needs to be addressed sooner than later, however. The margins of the questionable statistics presented are well beyond the margin of victory.
Finally, that "leaked" call between Trump and the GA sectary of state everyone went ape shit over, did you know that was literally illegal. It was a Settlement Call, lawyers on both side were present (and named) and all of that was privileged. The GA Sec of State should be in jail right now. He won't be.
Calls between attorneys negotiating a settlement aren't privileged. The "confidentiality" of settlement negotiations isn't confidentiality in the normal sense; rather, it simply establishes that you can't take material from settlement discussions and introduce it as evidence in a subsequent civil trial: it frees the parties to discuss things without having to worry about answering for every word they say in a subsequent trial.
If you've ever been involved in a civil conflict, you've noticed: every single piece of paper exchanged is marked "confidential settlement communication". You can publish all of it if you want.
You don't have to take my word for it (though: I've been in civil disputes, noticed this, and asked about it); legal experts on Twitter were dunking on pundits for thinking these conversations were confidential in the normal sense.
None of these sources seem to address the fact that this counting happened late at night/in the morning, timestamped on the video, after all the observers had been sent home. In fact, one of the sources said this:
> Media and observers left as employees packed up. But Fulton’s election director called a supervisor at State Farm a few minutes later, telling them to keep counting after the Secretary of State’s office called and said they shouldn’t stop counting for the night so early.
So the sources you listed literally confirm that they kept counting after they sent observers home. You seriously don't see that as a problem? I do. There are tons of volunteers who would gladly stay up all night to help observe. Over and over and over again, observers were sent home and counting continued.
All these articles that start with "debunked" go on to say this exact same thing happened, and then dismiss it as normal counting behavior. Do you understand why myself, and millions of Americans, have trouble with these stories? The headline frames the article, and then the article contracts the headline.
Did you ... did you actually read the stories, or just past random links based on the headlines?
Yes I have, thanks for your concern. I have a cache of these links from earlier when I cared enough to argue.
So you agree that the framing of “they pulled out a mysterious box from under the table” is completely false? That was the part being debunked. The story is “people started packing up for the day, then got asked to resume the work”. I fail to see what’s illegal about it. Where’s the fraud? Sure, if you’re already inclined to be suspicious you’ll find hints of problems in any little hiccup. That’s a little bit thin as far as proving a coordinated multi-state conspiracy goes.
How is continuing to count without observers present even remotely a good thing in one of the most controversial elections of our time? Why didn't they call the observers back in?
Why dismiss everyone and then tell some people to go back to work with the process half broken? It's bad optics and it's a blatant ethical problem.
We're at an impasse because we're literally seeing the same thing and also seeing two totally different things. It's kinda amazing, and tragic. I'm sure you feel the same.
Yes I understand where you’re coming from. To me, if these are the facts it just seems like your garden variety bureaucratic screw up. I agree it’s bad optics, and I’d like all of my government agencies to be supremely competent but we have what we have. It’s a pretty big leap for me to go full conspiracy mode based on this.
My hope is that years down the road when the dust settles we all should be able to see more clearly what happened.
When one person you meet in a day is an asshole - you met an asshole.
When every person you meet in a day is an asshole - you're the asshole.
Right now - you're the asshole. Every party involved, from the courts, to the (republican) GA government, to the media, to the pollworkers, to me, is telling you this was audited to hell and back, but you don't give a shit.
Instead you post a video that was actually discussed in the call you're so concerned about, where the Secretary of state clearly says the edited version you posted was designed to make it look fishy, and after review of the full footage by auditors and the media, there wasn't anything there.
You're not arguing in good faith. You're either ignorant or intentionally deceitful, and I want no more part of it.
> The SCOTUS claimed there was no standing in the Texas case, and didn't hear the merits.
Texas had no standing. They couldn't have standing. They alleged that Pennsylvania law violated Pennsylvania constitution. The people who decide whether or not that statement is true is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which did decide that the alleged violation was not in fact a violation of the state constitution. Even federal courts, when they do hear allegations about state law, are required to give extreme deference to state supreme courts in their interpretation of the matter.
Texas has no more right to question Pennsylvania's conduct under Pennsylvania legal rules than Iran has to question US conduct under US legal rules. To not dismiss the case would be to say that the rule of the law is literally less important than people's feelings. Do you really want to live in a country that does not care about the rule of the law?
Standing: If A violated the rights of B, person C watching it cannot sue on A's behalf.
The Texas standing was always going to be an issue, yes. What right does Texas have to make PA enforce their own laws? PA can choose not to enforce their laws if they want. But Texas, and six other states, claimed this would have diluted their own votes for the Federal Government.
I do not believe the standing issue here, because there is literally no other court for Texas to sue in. This wasn't really an issue of standing. It was an issue of cowardice.
Standing: because the federal courts would otherwise be panels of life-tenured unelected philosopher-kings, in order to bring a matter before them, you must personally have suffered an injury that it is within the court's legal power to redress.
Every single justice on the Supreme Court, 6 of whom are conservative, rejected the Texas argument (Alito and Thomas share an idiosyncratic belief that all "original jurisdiction" cases [those between states] have to be heard, regardless of how stupid, and so would have forwarded the case but not granted relief).
> claimed this would have diluted their own votes for the Federal Government.
Texas gets x votes of the 538 electoral votes. It gets that no matter how Pennsylvania chooses its electors; the number of electoral votes is fixed as a matter of reckoning by the census. So how can Texas's electoral votes possibly be diluted?
It should also be noted that the legal theory of "vote dilution" is applied to a very narrow set of cases where one can bring suit, essentially only gerrymandering cases. It has never, to my knowledge, been applied to a case where it was claimed that an invalid or fraudulent vote causes vote dilution for everyone who casts their votes properly. I actually believe a few courts have considered that claim and expressly denied that claim, although that has not made it to the Supreme Court before.
> there is literally no other court for Texas to sue in. This wasn't really an issue of standing.
You've not-so-cleverly dodged the issue I brought up: the law does not give Texas any possible legal standing to sue Pennsylvania. Period. Full-stop. End-of-question. To demand that the court hear Texas's plea is to demand that the court violate the rule of the law. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that to have standing, you have to demonstrate a particular injury, which cannot be a generalized grievance. Texas did not, and cannot, demonstrate any injury. Hell, Texas compounds its error by complaining about other states undertaking the same actions it took itself (as the DC-et-al brief so kindly points out [1]), which is compounding the bad faith with which it filed its brief.
Texas had no injury. It tried to BS its way to one, and its BS was called out as such in all the respondent brief, and Texas's reply brief basically amounted to "nuh-uh" without really attacking the gravamen of any reply. I agree with Tom Goldstein here that SCOTUS should have abandoned its practice of dismissing this kind of case with a one-sentence per curiam order and actually release the kind of dismissal opinion that is routine in all other courts laying out just why the case was never going to be heard.
Texas doesn't have a right to sue PA for not following its own laws. That right is granted only to PA residents--and some residents did sue the PA government in this regard on the law in question, and that lawsuit already failed by the time Texas filed its suit, a fact you again choose to ignore.
[1] Yes, I read every single brief in that case. So I know what the actual gravamen of Texas's claims were, and it was very clear from the first brief that Texas filed that the case was going to be dismissed with no dissent, as it was [2]. I may not be a lawyer, but what's going on here isn't exactly delving very deep into the weeds of specialized law: this is basic, Law 101 standing stuff.
[2] Thomas and Alito noted that they dissented only insofar as they think the pseudo-cert motion for intra-state disputes must be heard. They would have still dismissed the case for the same reason as the other 7 justices, and they commented as much. This dissenting on grounds of pseudo-cert process not being constitutional was also 100% predicted, with the only question being if Barrett would agree with them here (she did not).
Funny how every time someone answers you with any sort of evidence, you don't bother responding to it in a later comment. Instead you move on to another "issue".
Can we at least agree the video you posted above was doctored, and demonstrably false?
Because otherwise I'm not assuming your faith at all. You put your deceit on clear display.
