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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this contradicted by reporters at the time saying that they were sent home for the night? Do we have video and audio of the event in question? edit: rather than downvoting me, please engage with the question so others can learn.

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 initi…

Thank you for your reply.

>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...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#412
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I think you've gathered, I'm coming from the "the trust is already gone" side.

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?

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.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#413
post #376

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.

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.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#415
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[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...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#416
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overs…

> 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, hear…

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.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#417
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Oliver should not be used for anything other than entertainment.

Argue the points, not the person.

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.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’m a Biden supporter but I would love to see some actual sources for this fraud.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This does not imply that "If the person does not go to jail, then the person was telling the truth."

No but it does make it less likely that they were lying, because of the penalty of jail time.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#420

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…

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.

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