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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#441
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.

> 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

Well now they'll have to do exactly that in a courtroom. I can't think of a better place for it.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For a community (HN) so focused on technology and the future, I'm surprised to see support for antiquated technology such as paper ballots. Does the future of voting not belong to online remote voting, like almost everything else? You can even buy a house from your phone now. In the future, we will know the results of the election as soon as the online polls close. The future is paperless.

Pretty much every noted cybersecurity expert disagrees.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#443
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plethora of court cases disagree with you.

~None~ Many were not discussed on merits. See link: http://wiseenergy.org/Energy/Election/2020_Election_Cases.ht... Many are still active (~30) Edit: correction

> None were discussed on merits.

Incorrect, read some of the cases. Quite a few were dismissed on the merits. Literally your own link says “YES” in the Decided on Merits column! Did you not read your link?

Some of the later cases were not decided on merits because they were filed so late (e.g., suing over a change suggested by Republicans used in the 2016 Wisconsin election to fill in missing zip codes and then used again in 2020, or a change passed by Republican legislators in 2019 and promoted by them to the public in 2020 in Pennsylvania, and only complained about after Biden won).

However, some courts did reach the merits and found the claims of Trump campaign and his allies to be completely meritless. Note that Giuliani and his associates, when under oath in court, stated their cases were not fraud cases but then went to press conferences and claimed they were.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/politics/federal-judge-dismis...

> Judge Matthew Brann of the US District Court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania called the Trump campaign's case "Frankenstein's monster" for its poorly stitched together legal theories.

>

> On Friday, a federal appeals court dealt the Trump campaign's effort another blow, with a Trump-appointed judge writing in a scathing opinion that the campaign's lawsuit lacked proof and that its allegations in Pennsylvania "have no merit."

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've seen that. It corroborates exactly what Giuliani was saying: the decision was made to bar observers and media from the room from the night, and the decision was made to nonetheless continue vote counting activities in their absence. That's the whole problem. The only thing the statement adds is that they investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong. That is not the same thing as having observers…

I must have missed the part of the video where media and observers were barred from the room, rather than simply having left. Could you give me a timestamp? With the whole thing being on camera and knowing that no secret ballot suitcases were smuggled in, are we to believe that in the absence of observers they somehow rigged the counting machines to mis-scan these ballots, even though the hand recount for Fulton only…

The observers are not there to make sure the ballot scanners are working. They're there to audit the portion of the process which can never ever be re-audited: the provenance of secret ballots. Of course if you re-count the same ballots over again you'll come up with something roughly the same. This "hand recount had identical* results" mantra to reinforce the core idea "the election has been independently verified" may work on the general public but it shouldn't work on HN.

There's no need to believe the suitcases were smuggled in, although you yourself appear to have doubts in that direction. For example, they could be perfectly authentic ballots with some flawed provenance. A priori this seems the most plausible explanation.

> rather than simply having left.

Leaving a semi-public place such as an arena or an office building for the night has the result of not being permitted back in until the next public opening. Your arguments have turned to disingenuity and open trolling.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#445
post #303

Earlier 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…

You clearly lack a fundamental understanding of the issues involved here... The voting process used by the Dominion machines involves a physical paper trail that is verified by the voter. Random sampling is done routinely comparing the electronically tabulated results against the paper audit log. In the case of Georgia, a full recount (by hand) was done on the paper ballots.

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 like a totally trustworthy system to me.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#446
post #8

I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns? If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.

>Why is it baseless to challenge voter fraud concerns?

It's not baseless to claim voter fraud when you have proof. It's baseless when you claim voter fraud without any actual proof.

>If anything this will chill future concerns and people will not speak up. It sounds like you don’t want anyone to ever question a vote.

It sounds like he expects the President of the United States to act with the integrity the office commands. Not ask/condone/allow his lawyer to lie on television (where he can make up any lie he wants) while admitting there was no fraud in court (where he's actually held legally accountable for his statements).

https://www.salon.com/2020/11/18/judge-cancels-fraud-evidenc...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#447
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.

> 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.

Why would their code matter? Far more important than the code is the paper ballot audit trail their machines produce.

And that audit trail has been audited by multiple states, run by both Republicans and Democrats, after the election and found to be flawless. The machines counted properly. https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/historic_first_statew...

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#448

Be great for threads like these if HN had both: 1) A block function so we could cut the massively-upvoted, one-sided comments and get to the impartial or contrary information buried underneath them. 2) A "unfade" button to see the massively-downvoted comments. I've generally found when threads take on this imbalanced and highly-polarised state, the stuff on the top isn't the cream.

You can collapse threads you no longer intend to read.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#449
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…

The counterargument has been heard. There are only so many times you can audit an election before you give up because the facts are not the point: there are plenty of people in the US who saw Trump as a savior because he's a mean spirited asshole who is afraid of a majority-minority country, and so they cannot comprehend how someone who was so popular to so many would have lost an election by such a large margin. Their brains are broken by a constant stream of alternate reality idiocy

Several judges punted on standing and laches but also said that even if they heard the case, it would not end up in the favor of the plaintiff because they were silly issues to bring up.

The GOP attorneys were basically arguing that the letter of the law says that only state legislatures have the right to do anything with regards to elections. They also asked the courts to grant state legislatures powers that they do not normally possess. These are complete nonsense and always has been. State legislatures don't actually do anything. They pass laws that direct how the rest of government operates, along with the limits of discretion those other branches have.

Everybody who paid ANY attention in this past election knows that their own states did these same things. Texas sent that lawsuit to the US Supreme Court. It was idiotic on standing issues alone, but also because they only challenged the actions of states that did not vote for Trump. Texas itself had an executive who changed the rules during the election. North Carolina also did this. They KNOW this.

But it's easier to believe that the election was stolen than it is to believe that the country chose someone who is the antithesis of the guy you supported, and so that's what they do.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#450
post #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.)

Any voting machine that doesn’t have printed paper ballots is questionable and should not be used. Dominion machines do, unfortunately there are a few non-swing states that have fully electronic voting still.
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