341–350 of 839 posts
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 damag…
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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.
I agree but wouldn't making the source code becoming public make the machines more prone to hacking?
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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.
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.
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 damag…
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.
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> It does seem strange to me that we set the bar so high for defamation Well, it's not that strange, if you look at how frequently mere threats of defamation lawsuits are used to chill free speech.
Indeed. The solution, though, is simple: every man woman and child in the USA should just get a law degree!
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 damag…
I also doubt Trump is the end point.
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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.
> their machines do generate a paper trail 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…
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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 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…
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Coz there is a significant risk of penalty, of jail time. That's what a sworn affidavit is, is it not?
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.
I sincerely hope that whatever happens with these lawsuits doesn't chill the speech of actual voting machine security research.
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.