Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani • Hacker News Board

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#781

Post by purchanceallus » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #490

purchaceallsus wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply. >The ballots were on camera in the room the entire time, if reporters had been sent home they still wouldn't have appeared out of a mystery suitcase. They were sealed on camera, then unsealed on camera, and counted on camera. They have been counted and recounted and recounted. Here are the sworn affidavits that state the observers were too far to monitor what was being done with the boxes wh…

I don’t have anything to add on monitoring distance, but both of the affidavits you linked specifically agree with the video that they left and not that they were kicked out, because everyone thought counting was finished for the night. Neither of them claims they wouldn’t have been allowed to stay if they had stayed until the room was empty. What the state investigator says, and what those affidavits both appear to…

>I don’t have anything to add on monitoring distance, but both of the affidavits you linked specifically agree with the video that they left and not that they were kicked out, because everyone thought counting was finished for the night. Neither of them claims they wouldn’t have been allowed to stay if they had stayed until the room was empty.

It seems the reason they thought they were done counting is because a supervisor told the counters to go home, and said that they were done counting for the day.

Relevant part from the linked document (paragraph 8):

"Sometime after 10 o'clock p.m., the counting activity slowed. Shortly afterward, a younger lady with long braided but blond hair yelled out to all of them they should stop working and come back tomorrow (the next day, Wednesday November 4th) at 8:30 A.M.. Thereafter, all but 4 election employees left State Farm, leaving just the blond haired lady (who Michelle and I assumed was the supervisor), two older ladies and Regina Waller at the location. This lady had appeared through the night and Michelle and I believed her to be the supervisor."

I think that while it is possible the observers could have just stayed there until everyone left, it is likely that they believed what they were told -- that the counting would finish the next day.

At any rate, it is at best a bad look. I agree that it doesn't prove fraud or anything close. It does, however, look suspicious and IMHO warrants further investigation.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#782

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #780

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The courts were never given anything to hear. They can’t just go to trial on hearsay, innuendo, or wild speculation. You have evidence or you don’t, this isn’t like a court room drama where they decide to go to trial first and see the evidence later.

Oh, hey Sean! I'd rather talk to you about future of programming than this junk, but OK. You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like eithe…

> Georgia, for example, is a mess.

States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally.

> You can't have video of people walking in with their outside clothes, without going through the processes and then say, "You have to prove that it contaminated the room." You don't; it's enough to show the process was tainted.

That is not how law works in the USA or any country that I'm aware of. You have to prove that wrong doing occurred, not prove that wrong doing did not occur. The burden of proof is always on the accuser, not the defendant. Science works the same way (something is a theory if it can't be disproven, not if it can be proven that it can't be disproven).

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#783

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #782

david927 wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hey Sean! I'd rather talk to you about future of programming than this junk, but OK. You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like eithe…

> Georgia, for example, is a mess. States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally. > You can't have video of pe…

> They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures.

State Constitution changes are often controlled by the people, ultimately, not the legislature, which has occasionally been used in Presidential election cases to argue that such State Constitutions cannot constrain regulation of state elections because they are not under the exclusive control of the legislature. The federal courts have, IIRC, consistently and emphatically rejected this logic, though.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#784

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #769

kreeben wrote: post #752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That clip does not show massive failure. Does it show failure? Yes. Is it massive? No. Did the US court system show massive fraud? No. Did they show fraud that wasn't massive but could still have changed the outcome of the election? No. Were you cheated out of winning the election? A thousand times no.

> Did the US court system show massive fraud? It was never heard in court. I think that's what people are upset about. If they felt it had its day in court, they would feel differently. Instead, they have the media patting their heads explaining that "it's all fine." Fraud didn't have to be proven; it simply had to be shown to have been possible. The question is whether protections were breached that keep fraud from…

> It was never heard in court.

This is substantively false. As well as the cases that did actually go to trial, many of the other cases heard the allegations and the descriptions offered of the evidence for them, viewed them in the light most favorable to the election challengers, and determined that they could not support the claims of any actual violation.

The only thing that didn’t happen in those cases, is the other side didn’t have the opportunity to find additional defects in the challenger’s evidence, but since the claims and evidence offered for them were inadequate to support any violation in the first place, that’s not really consequential.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#785

Post by david927 » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #782

david927 wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hey Sean! I'd rather talk to you about future of programming than this junk, but OK. You're right, that's what the courts are saying. I don't think most people are buying that, though. There's too much video evidence and testimony to dismiss every motion. Georgia, for example, is a mess. To say that it's fine is taking the result you want and working backwards. (Again, I'm a Bernie Sanders guy. I don't like eithe…

> Georgia, for example, is a mess. States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally. > You can't have video of pe…

So if I run in with a thousand ballots and shuffle them in with existing ballots, unless you can prove that I changed the outcome, that's fine?

I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#786

Post by jariel » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

qwerty12345678 wrote: post #736

jariel wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And why doesn't anyone want to prove Biden won?" There's an election process with many layers of oversight, that's the 'proof'. Just because there are what might appear to be opaque elements to us plebes, doesn't mean there is any material lack of integrity. Most tellingly: Giuliani himself did not argue fraud in court - because he could be disbarred for introducing garbage in that process. If the Giuliani/Trump cas…

> There's an election process with many layers of oversight, that's the 'proof'. In what world do you live in where this statement constitutes as proof . > Just because there are what might appear to be opaque elements to us plebes, doesn't mean there is any material lack of integrity. This is extremely naive. Politicians take shits just like you and me, power is an illusion. I believe I've touched on most of your ot…

Where is the 'Proof' that Joe Biden was born in America? I mean, anyone can forge a birth certificate.

Where is the 'Proof' that he's 82 and not 87?

So you're having a difficult time accepting that for many things in life we use inference and incidental facts, we don't provide forensic evidence.

Moreover, if there was a problem with the election, it's your issue to prove, not the other way around.

If there was such widespread fraud as Trump claimed, it would be relatively easy to prove.

As for 'Politicians shits and power is an illusion' - this doesn't make any sense at all.

Politicians lie and cheat, yes of course, that's why we have oversight, recounts, process, procedure, voting machines etc..

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#787

Post by jariel » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #770

jariel wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You can’t kill someone because you think you are acting in self-defense. You have to actually be acting in self-defense. Moreover, pressuring officials to manufacture fake evidence, or act as if they had evidence they don’t have, surely ough…

We're not talking about murder.

We're talking about a different kind of crime.

The law states someone has to 'knowingly try to interfere etc' but the challenge is that you'd have to prove that Trump knew he lost.

If he truly believed he had won, well, then he'd just be trying to fix the election, not rig it, right?

The call was along the lines of how Mafia bosses talk, so that they don't implicate themselves.

Here are some details [1]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-s-call-g...

I think they ought to adjust the laws here. Elected officials should maybe be able to provide evidence for review, but that's it.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#788

Post by TheDong » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

jb775 wrote: post #726

TheDong wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say more about how a blockchain ledger could allow verifying what software is running on a device? The only way I can think of to actually do this is to have some trusted party go out and randomly sample voting machines (i.e. check the software on the disk matches the reproducible builds of the open source software, and decap the machine's CPU and other hardware to verify there's no bugs). Anything else can be foiled…

If there was a whole new voting system built from scratch, couldn't it be designed to use some sort of integrity key in combination with each voter's personal key? Kind of like how some CDNs have an integrity attribute to ensure the CDN's source code hasn't been manipulated.

I don't think that ends up working for voting machines because those are two different problems.

With the CDN, the user receives source code and they want to verify the source code is unchanged. Checking a hash of the data they received is sufficient.

For a voting machine, what's the analogue? If I walk up to a voting machine with an integrity key, how do I check that the source code it's running has a given hash or is signed with a given key?

If the voting machine itself shows the code or does the check, obviously a person who compromised the machine can fake that bit. If I have to remove the hdd and verify the data on it, and take apart the voting machine to verify there's no second hard drive... well, that seems like it's well out of reach of any voter verifying it.

Integrity keys, hashes, signatures, blockchains, etc can verify digital data, can verify the contents of data that servers serve... But they don't seem to solve the problem of "what code is this machine running", and that seems to be the important problem for voting machine code.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#789

Post by justinzollars » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

the_drunkard wrote: post #764

justinzollars wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, What I saw was this. The voter file was completely inaccurate. It was very common to go to a residence where voters: a. had moved b. had died c. had multiple 12+ voters currently registered at one apartment address, none of whom live there. From my perspective there are real issues with sending unsolicited mail in ballots to homes because the government does such a bad job managing the voter file. Often it is d…

> Based on this experience, I strongly support voting in person, with an ID. Shhh, a view like this will get you banned from Twitter... ;)

It is not a popular view. You are required to say there are no issues, even though the issues can be experienced by anyone who participates in a campaign.

Re: Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani

#790

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

david927 wrote: post #785

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Georgia, for example, is a mess. States and election officials of states run elections. They are given a lot of latitude in how they run elections, limited by state law and state constitution edits that are also controlled by state legislatures. State courts can only evaluate wrong doing based on those rules, laws, and such, if they are messed up, the courts can't fix them unilaterally. > You can't have video of pe…

So if I run in with a thousand ballots and shuffle them in with existing ballots, unless you can prove that I changed the outcome, that's fine? I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.

> So if I run in with a thousand ballots and shuffle them in with existing ballots, unless you can prove that I changed the outcome, that's fine?

A crime is a crime regardless of whether it effects the outcome. It is fairly straightforward to prove that you stuffed a thousand ballets if you actually did that, we just have to show evidence of what you did! It is impossible to prove that you or someone else didn't stuff ballots, because it is logically a possible that it occurred. IE proving existence is something that is possible, proving non-existence is something that is impossible.

> I'm saying the wrong doing is invalidating the electoral process.

I'm saying that there is simply no evidence of wrong doing so the courts have nothing to act on. We haven't even made it to the "should the wrong doing invalidate the electoral process" yet.