Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's their right to defend their reputation. If there is any proof against them let those come to light and if the machines are indeed not good let the company go belly up. But what if the allegations are lies? Shouldn't the originators of those lies take responsibility?
Of course they should be able to sue if the can show actual damages, but then that’s not chilling speech. I took GP meaning that they want corporations to shut down anything they don’t like. That’s typically what’s meant by chilling speech.
Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
651–660 of 839 posts
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#652I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The courts didn’t “entertain” them because of standing. Cases weren’t thrown out on merits. No court has actually heard evidence. This is false on several levels. One, several cases went through trial to a verdict. Second, of those that did not, several were thrown out on grounds that while perhaps “procedural”, include as part of their standards review of the actual and proferred evidence in the light most favorab…
> When cases are, as many of the Trump & allied cases were, thrown out for this reason, the court is making a finding on the merits ... That's not the way lawyers use the term "on the merits". See, e.g., [0]. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/on_the_merits
I'm fully aware of how lawyers use the term, but that's immaterial to the import being given to the term in this discussion. To the extent that whether a case was decided “on the merits” is being used as a proxy for the argument that the probative value of the evidence actually in the Trump campaign’s hands in claims of election fraud has not been evaluated, it is only valid if you consider any decision (even of “procedural” rather than “on the merits” in traditional legal categorization) where, in fact, that evidence was weighed by a standard at least as favorable as it would be at trial and nevertheless found wanting.
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strong disagree. The judges dismissed mainly (totally) on two grounds - laches, and failure to state a legal case. If you're just whining, the court isn't going to hear you. Get out of here with that stuff and stop wasting our time, says the court. They aren't your chance to stand up and rant about stuff. And laches is, you didn't like the rules? Sue before the election; you had plenty of time. You wait until after?…
LOL. "The record establishes that Wisconsin's selection of its 2020 Presidential Electors was conducted in the very manner established by the Wisconsin Legislature, by general ballot at the general election... plaintiff has not shown a significant departure from the Wisconsin Legislature's chosen election scheme ... This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits. In his rep…
Second: I misread your comment as saying that it was ridiculous for the judges to not rule on the merits. I agree with you that the (alleged) merits of the cases were ridiculous.
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, a previous version of this company known as Diebold was used in the 2004 election, and Democrats claimed the electronic voting machines were used to commit voter fraud. Apparently, one could open up the vote ledger in MS Access and modify the votes without any kind of audit trail or password. Hopefully after the multiple rebrandings Dominion has gotten its security under better control :D See the leaked m…
Diebold is not a previous version of Dominion. Dominion acquired all of the material assets of Premier, which was a renamed Diebold, from ES&S due to an anti-trust lawsuit. Now, ES&S has issues, but you're not going to hear anything about that. Because ES&S machines are used in places like Kentucky, South Carolina, and Florida.
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the claims if significant vote fraud were thrown out by courts up and down the land, including the Supreme Court and yet still a huge mob of nutters stormed the Capitol. A mere court finding isn’t going to stop Dominion employees getting death threats. It needs to be clearly and forcefully demonstrated that knowingly and recklessly and maliciously lying to the public with the intention of causing harm to a compan…
The most significant cases were dismissed on procedural issues without reaching the merits. That doesn't necessarily mean they had merit, but arbitrarily many procedural dismissals don't show that one way or the other. I feel like this is the problem with the discourse right now. It's understandable why you're making that argument, because the media has been saying that for months now. Because in fact a large number…
The issue is that their leaders are more than happy to just lie to them constantly, reality be damned. And they don’t know, or they don’t care that they’re being lied to.
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
As to (3), Ken and others have also pointed out, Rudy or Sydney Powel being lawyers have a duty to know this sort of thing so there's a chance that they'll be found to have actual malice even without a finding that Rudy was knowingly lying.
Serious Question: Why is everyone assuming they're lying? And why doesn't anyone want to prove Biden won? From my perspective, the accusations he made were completely dodged by Dominion and by Democrats (since their guy was labeled the winner by the media). 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…
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.
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dominion, as an operating business, has effectively been destroyed. No bipartisan election committee is going to buy their stuff anymore when it is an article of unshakable faith among one of the two parties that their machines fraudulently stole an election. So now their owners[1] need to figure out how to get whatever value they can. This isn't a "campaign", it's just a business effort. They've been transformed int…
Now if only all the other electronic voting machine companies would be similarly destroyed. There's no good reason to not have publicly counted paper ballots. Other developed countries don't seem to have problems running their elections that way.
So the issue isn't "electronic voting" vs. "paper ballots".
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#659Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have read too many court documents over the last 10 years and I agree. Generally, you want to start out with your strongest statement. In this case, the strong argument is very easily legally defensible. It was very clear in context why Rudy was not pleading fraud because it wasn't the point he was making at that time. That's the strongest argument? So I wonder what exactly is the point of this lawsuit? I'm going t…
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/...
From the article:
"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."
Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still super relevant to note that whereever they were in court Rudy et al were very careful to say we're not alleging or prosecuting fraud here because they could be hit with perjury for lying to the court. When not under the treat of perjury is when the election was a fraud.
As far as I know he only said that in the Pennsylvania case, because they had quite a strong argument there that the rules changes made in Pennsylvania violated their state constitution, and then given limited time/resources they went with the argument there that was easier to prove. But that was one of the cases dismissed over procedure. The courts essentially said they should have complained about it before the ele…
That PA case was a real shitshow, and actually involved several claims from several parties in the same case:
* Act 77 was PA-state unconstitutional (despite the PA Supreme Court refusing to agree), and that makes it federal unconstitutional.
* Relatedly, state courts enforcing changes to state law under state constitutions are (federal) unconstitutional modifications to election procedures, because only state legislatures can change election procedures [this was a really daft argument].
* Some counties didn't give their residents a chance to cure their ballots
* Observers weren't permitted to stand as closely as the Republicans wanted to the ballot counting tables
While the constitutionality of Act 77 would have been their strongest argument had they challenged it in state court, they didn't in the case in the question (because they already lost that case), and they combined it with several other cases to argue over every nitpick they could find in PA. If Giuliani seriously believed that the machine counts were wrong in PA, I suspect he would have tacked that on to the case, as they were already claiming everything else.