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Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

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Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#671

Post by luxuryballs »

standardUser wrote: post #664
andrewflnr wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cop-out. Other countries seem to be able to have voter identification, the US should be capable of it, too. Start by making the identity card free-as-in-beer, bonus points for not requiring a permanent address.

"Start by making the identity card free-as-in-beer..." The people putting forward voter ID laws usually do the opposite. They want to make obtaining an ID more difficult and make that ID a requirement to vote. If we just say "getting and ID should be easy" but don't actually make it easy, and then we increase voter ID requirements, we are disenfranchising voters.

Yeah but those people existing doesn’t change the actual merits of the idea itself.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#672

Post by ekianjo »

RHSeeger wrote: post #560
qwerty12345678 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#673

Post by luxuryballs »

perl4ever wrote: post #616
flerchin wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have paper trails for every vote.

I believe you are both mistaken. From what I've read, there are some states/localities that have paper ballots they can check, including swing states like Georgia, where they did audit that exact thing. But then there are other states that do not keep the paper trail, most of which went "red" according to an article I read but did not verify.

Correct, this is all in the dominion voting machine documentation. In some implementations if a ballot goes to adjudication based on some configured error threshold it means the machine operation gets a chance to look and decide what the ballot actually says, at which point it generates a new “corrected” ballot image and discards the “unreadable” one.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#674

Post by bdowling »

dragonwriter wrote: post #653
bdowling wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> That's not the way lawyers use the term "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, i…

The standard that a court uses when considering a motion to dismiss (e.g., Rule 12(b)(6)) is to first assume all of the facts alleged in the complaint are true. The judge then decides the motion as a matter of law. That is the exact opposite of weighing the evidence, which doesn't happen until trial.

Edit: I think we're in agreement that "on the merits" here is being conflated with a trial that considers the probative value of evidence. They are not the same thing.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#675

Post by mr_toad »

jariel wrote: post #644
edgyquant wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t know it was a crime isn’t a proper legal defense

That's not the defence though. The defence is 'I legitimately believed the election was stolen in Georgia, therefore, pressuring state officials to investigate said issues' doesn't itself constitute a crime. It's entirely plausible that people 'get things wrong' in the real world. But once you have a guy who will believe everything that's to his benefit, and claim that everything not to his credit is a lie ... well t…

I don’t know that either insanity or ‘I really believed it’ are defences in a defamation lawsuit.

In any case I think it’s unlikely that Rudi will be claiming insanity.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#676

Post by ekianjo »

boulos wrote: post #601
qwerty12345678 wrote: post #588

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)

> . 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)

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#677

Post by luxuryballs »

jonas21 wrote: post #262
tunesmith wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it - not the lawsuit itself, but the public perception of it - could come back to bite the other side. There have been plenty of good reasons to suspect electronic voting in the past, at least in the absence of verifiable paper backups and regular random sampling recounts of those paper ballots. Which is still a pretty rare practice, isn't it? In the absence of those standards, it's still reasonable to…

But that's the thing about Dominion -- their machines do generate a paper trail, and this paper trail was audited. One of the big pushes to secure this election compared to previous ones was to use as many voting machines with auditable paper trails as possible.

The adjudication process is where things get dicey though, if the machine seems a ballot unreadable it defers to the machine operator to tell it which candidate was selected, and this accuracy is a configurable threshold.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#678

Post by jcranmer »

pdonis wrote: post #630
CydeWeys wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing not doing it. ID verification disenfranchises way more people than fraudulent votes prevented.

> ID verification disenfranchises How so? How many eligible voters don't already have government issued IDs?

The most common government-issued ID is a driver's license, to the point that it can sometimes be hard to get a government ID that isn't a driver's license. So anyone who can't drive has an uphill battle--predominantly blind people, as well as poor people who live in the inner city where car ownership is infeasibly expensive. Another commonish case is tribal reservations, where tribal documentation is usually sufficient, but the state might not consider a tribal ID sufficient to vote.

The statistics I've seen for people who lack valid voter ID is somewhere in the region of 10-15%. Unsurprisingly, this tends to be concentrated among groups that tend to be more reliably Democratic than Republican (something like 25% of African Americans lack valid ID), which is why voter ID is often a dog whistle for disenfranchising certain voters.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#679

Post by ekianjo »

ahupp wrote: post #602
chrisco255 wrote: post #469

I think it's nuts for a modern democracy to allow for anything but open source software being used to count paper ballots with chain-of-custody records, voter ID validation, biometric markings, and redacted ballots being published on the web for all to view and count independently. Software systems can easily be hacked, and it isn't easy to inspect and tell. A vote is a one time, one sided transaction. It's not as ea…

Open source doesn't really help here, because even if I can see the source I don't have a way to verify what was running. It's more important to just not rely on software for the critical path, and make sure there's an auditable paper trail.

What if you used the combination of FOSS and a blockchain ledger?

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#680

Post by ekianjo »

jpxw wrote: post #517
chrisco255 wrote: post #469

I think it's nuts for a modern democracy to allow for anything but open source software being used to count paper ballots with chain-of-custody records, voter ID validation, biometric markings, and redacted ballots being published on the web for all to view and count independently. Software systems can easily be hacked, and it isn't easy to inspect and tell. A vote is a one time, one sided transaction. It's not as ea…

Yes, it’s either that or just use paper ballots, hand counted. When I learned that the US actually uses software in its elections, I was shocked. It’s unthinkable here in the UK.

> It’s unthinkable here in the UK.

Not just in the UK. Most Western democracies consider the idea completely crazy because nothing can be properly audited once papers are removed.

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