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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#381
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Since I voted in Georgia on these machines, the process is the following: - get ID validated & ability to vote - get an initialized smart card - insert in polling machine, fill out stuff - submit, get printout from printer - scan printout into a machine - return smart card At the polling places I was at (we had a runoff), the staff + signage was emphasizing to check results on printout. The printing and the scanning…

This isn't how mail-in ballots work, though.

For mail-in ballots, a hand-filled ballot is scanned, and if there's a discrepancy it gets corrected then re-printed by an official in a process called adjudication. This is supposed to be done in front of an observer from both parties so security checks like signature matching can be performed, which was not done as evidenced in the Fulton county video footage.

Mail-in voting creates the opportunity for mass manufacturing ballots as well as hijacking ballot adjudication processes, especially if you block bipartisan observation to circumvent security checks put in place specifically to mitigate these types of fraud.

And "hand recounts" would not uncover these issues. [1]

You don't need "widespread" fraud to overturn an election. Biden only won 16% of counties. Only a few key counties need to be targeted to flip a national election.

[1] https://billmoyers.com/story/georgias-hand-count-of-2020-bal...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be much more worried about the absolutely insane nonsense that Giuliani and his ilk have been spewing. That is far more damaging to voting machine research than this lawsuit.

As long as potentially hackable voting machines are used in elections, the anxiety about hacking will be there and will eventually be exploited by politicians. If we want to fix the issue, we really just need to move back to hand counting paper ballots.

If you think that voting machine hacking is a genuine issue, then you should want Giuliani to shut up and go away ASAP. Having your arguments mixed up with crazy pants conspiracy theories is a one way ticket to people deciding that you’re also a crank to be ignored.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#384
post #19

Unfortunately this is not a good thing for Dominion in the long term. The cult made up lies and successfully convinced a large population its real and the whole party brass is in on the scam. However this is a terrible situation for Dominion. They are forced to sue to prove they are not in the wrong, however that will spun as choosing sides and they could be kicked out when the contract ends. For the cult, this compa…

$1.3 billion would provide them some comfort.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#385
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.

IMO: any database used for voting that doesn't always have monotonically increasing counts is questionable (regardless of what happened in 2020.)

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's baseless allegations of collusion with Russia that we accept as the reason for undermining confidence in our democracy.

The Mueller report clearly stated that Russia had active efforts to influence the 2016 election, the Trump campaign was aware of those efforts, and the Trump campaign expected to benefit from those efforts. Are you claiming that you're more informed than Robert Mueller?

And so did the Senate intelligence report written by Republicans. The most interesting thing about Russiagate is that it's completely true!

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good news is election security researchers mostly agree with you. The prevailing opinion of election security professionals is that State election systems should be designed assuming the machines are insecure and the process should be tolerant to that fault. That's why many states that use electronic voting or tabulation produce a voter verifiable paper trail. That means, when you're done voting the machine gives…

checking a random sample is not enough for the US election system. in a few states it's decided by a few thousand votes

Random sampling is always able to prove as accurately as you wish that something is true. Increase the sample size as needed.

Georgia was the closest percentagewise in 2020. 4935487 votes were cast between Trump and Biden, and the difference was 11779 votes. However, even if Georgia went to Trump, Biden still wins, so you're forced to check states with even larger gaps.

However, even in Georgia, to claim the election should have gone the other way with 99% certainty, it is not hard to check wherever you want. This was done by many groups, for example here [1]. Of course, given the sheer idiocy of Trump followers and news support, they don't educate their supporters on any of this, because the facts destroy their claims.

Since voter records are public in pretty much every state (every one I've looked at over the past few elections let you download them), it's trivial for researchers to do this sampling. They do this every election, and that is how they make the statements they do about the extremely low rates of fraud - they did do the testing.

Trump and co did it too, and found nothing. They had the lists immediately, because they started publishing names they claimed were fraudulent, and in each case the media showed them wrong. So they were looking at the names.

And even with those names, and the ability to sample, they still didn't put forth any solid evidence. Sampling irregularities would have been enough to get more eyes looking. But they knew (just like Trump knew in 2016 with his Clinton 3M illegal votes charade that he eventually dropped) that this is a lie.

[1] https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/3rd_strike_against_vo...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#388

The article states that at one point in time, at a voluntary hearing in Michigan, Dominion CEO said "It is technologically impossible to see votes being counted in real-time or to flip them". I think that everybody here is fairly technically inclined so what are your guys thoughts on this? My personal opinion is that using the term "technologically impossible" in this instance was not a good idea. If @antirez is read…

Calling it impossible to flip votes is quite silly. You can just pre-program the machine to pick a candidate randomly every few votes and you skew the election. Do it after the first few votes to give you a distribution so as to only do it between the major candidates and not inflate any marginal runners. Do it only on machines in locations that vote against your preferred candidate and you skew to your candidate. If there are no paper receipts you just get away with it. If there are you can still attack democracy itself by sowing a bunch of doubt in the election. Electronic voting is a really poor idea. There's no credible evidence the US election was stolen but the way it's ran is appalling and makes this kind of mistrust easy, which is a very important failure mode as was evident this time around.

We had an election here yesterday. Each voter just filled in a pre-printed paper and dropped it into a box. COVID restrictions meant we had up to 10 minute queues depending on time of day, normally it's much faster. Each polling table is self-contained and had less than 1000 votes to count at the end of the day. They're just setup in school buildings on a Sunday when they'd otherwise be empty. Two hours after the election almost all of them had counted their votes, reported them centrally and that was available on a simple website anyone can see. There will be a central recount in a few days as a double check. It never finds any differences. Each of these polling tables is staffed with 5 or 6 people that double check what each of them is doing and makes it so there's a lot of people involved in the election further increasing the trust of the population in the process, because a not insignificant part of them take part. The scaling of the process is embarrassingly parallel so is workable for any size of country or election. I don't get why anyone would want to go through all the trouble of inventing these complex technology solutions to a non-problem that then create these huge attack vectors not only to actually do something nefarious but even more importantly to convince people that that has happened and rile up a mob.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#389
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won’t baseless accusations of no voter fraud undermine the confidence even more? After all, is there any evidence for voter fraud in Russia?

Presumably, the issue is baseless accusations in general. It doesn't matter what side a baseless claim happens: its bad either way. Dominion Voting Systems must prove that Rudy Giuliani was making up information to succeed in this court case. Unfortunately, defamation is surprisingly hard to win in the USA (which is why the US's Tabloid media can get so far with so many claims). Dominion Voting Systems is not a publi…

A company can be a public figure.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#390

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…

There have been audits showing inconsistencies in the dominion systems in Michigan.

https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20423772-antrim-cou...

In addition they have videos of dominion employees supposedly explaining how to flip votes.

https://thespectator.info/2021/01/04/new-video-shows-dominio...

If you watched the state senate hearings you can see these. Witnesses share their findings. As far as I’m aware Giuliani repeats these, in defense of his client.

Michigan: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eZXkAv7yKgw

Kinda feel like this lawsuit will go no where. Then again politics seem to be all that matter here. We shall see how it plays out, I suspect given the stakes Guiliani will go down.

Frankly, I’ve seen the evidence Guiliani has presented and I find it convincing, at least enough to warrant an investigation. It’s quite surprising the state of things. I urge everyone to do their own research and decide, particularly, watch the state hearings on election fraud.

EDIT: I personally think this is an effort to tie down trumps legal defense team during the impeachment.

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