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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#701

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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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a general rule of thumb, if you make an extraordinary claim, the burden lies on your to provide proof if you want to be believed. Claiming that there was widespread election fraud, including by the companies making some of the devices, is an extraordinary claim. It doesn't appear there's been any proof provided to back up those extraordinary claims. As such, they can, and should, be ignored.

> if you make an extraordinary claim, the burden lies on your to provide proof if you want to be believed. In general this statement makes sense, but for election-related systems you'd rather want a way to prove the systems are actually reliable and not hackable, and not wait for something wrong to happen in the first place. That's precisely why most democracies actually still use and only allow paper ballots.

The machines in question vary in type, but most are scanners to aid in counting paper ballots. The others are touchscreen entry devices that print a paper ballot as a hard copy. Hand recounts of the paper ballots have been done -- statewide in Georgia, in one county in Michigan -- and not shown that the machines switched votes as alleged by Giuliani and pals. From here the conversation devolves into conspiracies about how the hand recounts weren't real recounts or fake ballots were printed to match the machine totals or something.

At which point the voting machine's role really doesn't matter because the fact is the people making these claims don't trust the paper ballot count either.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#703
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes. Do you know where the Dominion validation process is clearly documented so it is easy to see whether it is easily subverted? I will bet the answer is no, and the software and hardware are all trade secrets and impossible for voters to verify :D. Sounds li…

> Seems trivial to 'randomly' sample a select subset of the votes. And that does nothing to guard against vote dumps. Non existent voters cannot validate their votes. Incorrect. Voter rolls have information about who voted, and this information is public record. You can simply call up a random sample of recorded 2020 voters in Georgia and ask them to confirm that they voted in the election. There is no way to undetec…

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't come down to Hitchen's razor, or any other etiquette of debate or rhetoric. It is simple innocence until proven guilty. Asserting fraud is making an accusation that crimes occurred, and the burden of proof is not on the accused. The idea that the proof is too well hidden is itself un-falsifiable, as any amount of effort to find proof, if it doesn't exist, can simply be dismissed as "well it's just too we…

"Innocence until proven guilty" is relating to an individual being formally accused of a crime in a court of law. We are talking about a PUBLIC PROCESS, which in my opinion doesn't fall into the same category. The burden of proof shouldn't fall on either side, it should be publicly verifiable . If a third-world country controlled by rebels ran a "free and fair" election, where they "counted" the presidential ballots…

Every time the states did something to check the integrity of the election, such as hand-recounting the ballots, or doing a signature verification audit, it was simply dismissed out of hand as a cover-up and not a real investigation.

The bar set by the "stop the steal" crowd was that unless you uncovered that Donald Trump really won the election, you didn't investigate hard enough.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#705

https://www.cnet.com/news/lawmakers-turn-to-hackers-at-def-c... It’s possible. If you DDG “voting machines defcon“ you’ll get articles of various manufacturers who have had voting machines broken into by DEFCON attendees. You can buy old voting machines on eBay. There’s plenty of evidence out there that ethical hackers proved machines can be tampered with. If ethical hackers can prove it’s possible, is it possible th…

which is why Krebs insisted on paper ballot backups. which were subsequently counted and found to match the original tabulations. all the voting machines do is print out a marked ballot, which the voter then checks for accuracy and scans into a tabulator.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burden of proof is on the accuser, and when the Trump side arrived in court over 60 times they didn’t bring any evidence . Occam’s razor says they don’t have any actual evidence, since if they did they would have brought it to court.

While I absolutely agree, it was disappointing that states didn’t go out of their way to prove Biden won, because now we have nearly 1/2 the country that isn’t quite sure. I get what the laws are and mostly why they are. I just think elections should be a system without question, regardless how ridiculous the claim is. It should be trivial to without question and verifiably prove them wrong.

While in general I agree that election systems should be obviously secure to the average voter, in this case I seriously doubt that it would help. Fundamentally the issue here is that Trump and his hangers on are absolutely willing to just lie their heads off, and his fans don’t seem to care one bit. If their fans will believe obvious bullshit such as the theory that the dead Hugo Chavez rigged an election for Biden with the help of Dominion, why would they believe what the states have to say about the election?

Heck, several counties have had to point out that they don’t use Dominion machines. If such basic facts can’t dissuade those who think this election was stolen, it’s not clear what would do it.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#707
post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to Hitchens's Razor, which I believe is a flawed mindset that's used selectively as it suits people. The situation here is that the proof is very well hidden, and therefore the situation has been rendered un-falsifiable. This is now essentially a Russell's Teapot[1] statement. I'd say when people start storming the US Capitol, it's time to stop ignoring the underlying issue. Why are you so afraid of…

Russell’s teapot doesn’t fit in this case. Paper ballots exist. Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand). Are there actually claims of miscounted votes that you feel were miscounted or incorrectly treated that you feel are verifiable? (And haven’t already been refuted via evidence)

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#708
post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russell’s teapot doesn’t fit in this case. Paper ballots exist. Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand). Are there actually claims of miscounted votes that you feel were miscounted or incorrectly treated that you feel are verifiable? (And haven’t already been refuted via evidence)

> . Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand). My understanding is that in several places the envelopes in which the ballots were sent were allegedly prone to irregularities and the ballots have been extracted anyway and the envelopes disposed of, so recounts would by default take in account faulty/incomplete ballots if this actually happened. (no idea if the claim is true, however)

I forgot to touch on this in my reply...If what I mentioned in my reply did in fact occur, you now understand why "recounts" wouldn't make any difference.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#709
post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complaint by Dominion very thoroughly refutes all the accusations here, and shows convincingly that they knew they were lying. It's 107 pages and has a total of 235 footnotes: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20463212/rudy.pdf

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.

It sort of reminds me of this super short research paper, in the sense that it's breaking the norms of a generally serious type of publication.

https://fermatslibrary.com/s/shortest-paper-ever-published-i...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#710
post #321

Earlier 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…

Let's look at the cases.

Only Sidney Powell cases claimed issues with dominion. The Arizona case was tossed because the evidence was not reliable. Most of the 50+ lawsuits claimed procedural issues and not fraud. Claiming mail-in ballots violated the equal protection clause was brought up heavily even though they've been used for over a hundred years and the Giuliani voted by mail in 2020 election.

The supreme court case brought by other state AGs claimed PA violated their own state constitution. I still don't understand how an AG from another state can sue another state for issues pertaining their own constitution in federal court. Federal court doesn't have jurisdiction to rule if an act violates a states constitution.

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