A prime example of why the route through the courts is probably a waste of time. I believe that massive fraud occurred in this election and that the election as a result was stolen from Trump. However, the press conference demonstrated that the Trump campaign simply lacks the evidence to cause the courts to intervene. I was especially disappointed in Sidney Powell. If you are going to allege that the Democrats stole the election with the aid of the voting machine company Dominion you need solid evidence. She simply does not have it yet. I actually think the Democrats committed the fraud through old fashioned ballot box stuffing by gathering up discarded mail in ballots and sending them in, and simply creating ballots on the spot election night. However, the Trump campaign, thus far, does not have evidence sufficient to prove any of this in court. If there is a path to victory it goes through the state legislatures, and this bumbling legal effort is diminishing the chances that Trump will be able to convince the Republican legislators to do so. Trump has been very ill-served by his attorneys, although it is quite likely he isn’t responding well currently to good advice as to how to win this, hoping for an easy victory through the courts.
I hope I am wrong but I fear I am not. Nothing is worse than knowing that a massive wrong has occurred, but having no recourse to remedy it.
Update:
Robert Barnes gives us the vey bad news:
Trump’s been ill-served, or Trump’s been served exactly how he wants to be?
Because at this point, I’m open to any idea, including Trump doesn’t mind losing, because Trump never expected to win the first time, and never really wanted to be President.
“Never really wanted to be President “. Sorta like Washington? Did a heck of a good job for someone who didn’t want it, especially considering the opposition including the Republican establishment. Maybe we need more Presidents who don’t really want the job.
They have the evidence, the “server”; the computer experts, the eye witnesses, and the law. It is prima facie evidence – namely fraud. They are not wasting time revealing it all when they have court deadlines coming up in the next few weeks. They are properly and intelligently saving this for court, which is abiding by the constitution. The media is not the judge and jury in this election, nor a replacement for the constitutional process. Patience.
One would think that a guy who genuinely wanted the second term he was being cheated out of, would at least be capable of putting together a competent legal team. One, for example, that knew the difference between Michigan and Minnesota.
Near as I can tell, this is a farce masquerading as a tragedy.
And I say that as someone who believes Trump had the most productive first term of any President since Reagan –despite the forces of the deep state arrayed against him and his agenda.
Not sure what’s up. I don’t think having the state legislatures replace the electors is a prudent way to right this unless you have satisfactory evidence of fraud that the public at large will acknowledge. That’s going to have to be established in court. They may have satisfactory evidence of the stuffing as well and this was obscured by their discussion of voting machines (which may also be corrupted). Also, I’d point out that there’s a difference between proof and between the sort of evidence courts have a habit of accepting as proof. IMO, statistical inference is powerful evidence if supplemented by exeplars like affidavits. Not sure lawyers in an occupation which emphasizes verbal intelligence and conventional epistemic rules will accept that.
We know there was fraud. We don’t know the scale. We have reason to believe the Secretary of State in Georgia has been corrupted, but we do not know the avenue. (We have reason to believe that because of the arbitrary limit placed on the number of Republican poll inspectors).
Elections administration has been done with the left hand in this country for a long time and over the years legislatures have thoughtlessly adopted practices (or allowed elections administrations to adopt practices) which exacerbated extant problems and introduced new ones.
When I was a kid, you had fill-in-the-box standardized tests which were scored by optical scanners which did not use software. We need un-networked machines like that to scan ballots or we need to be tabulating by hand. We need to be reporting precinct data to a central tabulation center by fax or e-mail, followed by hand delivery of tabulation reports signed by the poll inspectors on site. We also need a secure chain of custody for paper ballots cast in precincts. The use of postal ballots should be limited to the 5-6% of the electorate who have an abiding problem preventing them from voting in person and perhaps the 3% or so who live in remote areas. And we need to order our electoral calendar so you don’t have witlessly complex ballots.
It’s weird in this country. We have the world’s most productive economy. For all the (quite justified, IMO) criticism of our school systems, we still manage to produce a workforce that generates more goods and services per worker than our Japanese and Swedish counterparts. And, yet, we have quite hopeless public institutions. It hardly matters what realm of public policy you’re talking about, they do nothing well. I can think of a couple of exceptions. Motor vehicle registries are a piece-of-cake compared to what they were like 40 years ago; and certain police departments have made admirable improvements in their effectiveness, improvements Democratic pols wish to trash. (Welfare reform of the Gingrich-Thompson variety was a success, but that mostly involved legislators restricting the circumstances under which public agencies could hand out dole money).
Love our court system, the standards and everything I wouldn’t change. But now I have to wonder… could vote fraud ever be proven beyond a reasonable doubt? Is it even possible to catch and punish the cheaters?
It looks like this year all those decades that judge spent keeping the consent decree renewed against Republicans were a waste. They could never do anything about the cheating anyway. Voting is just another bread and circuses.
“could vote fraud ever be proven beyond a reasonable doubt? Is it even possible to catch and punish the cheaters?”
Yes to both, and successful prosecutions have been brought but never on a national scale. Florida 2000 was a revelation as to how hap hazard counting votes and voting tends to be. Litigation this vast and in the short amount of time alloted is an almost impossibility. The state legislature route is the only real option in a case like this, and that is a highly risky and uncertain undertaking.
And unlikely to be successful because nobody wants to deal with the blowback.
Which, sadly, only encourages the bastards.
So that explains everything actually. They only bothered cheating at the national elections because they knew the scale would be so large, they could never be caught in time – but let many of the smaller, local elections go on because cheating at those would be caught.
Florida 2000 was a revelation as to how hap hazard counting votes and voting tends to be.
And, collectively, we accomplished nothing in the way of improving matters. I’ve spent most of my life in New York. New York isn’t in the news right now I suspect because the Secretary of State has nothing to do with elections administration – it’s all done by two and four person boards appointed by the party chairmen who employ equal numbers of patronage employees. And those two and four person boards have been quite chary about technological innovation. Mechanical lever machines were in general use as recently as 2007.
“because cheating at those would be caught.”
Im my experience a lot of people watch local elections, up to and including the House, like hawks. Often jobs are on the line for the observers or friends and relatives Any unusual voting patterns stick out like sore thumbs to these expert observers, and petitions challenging results are often quickly filed. A lot of election litigation goes on under the radar because it is at such a local level, but there is a fair amount of it across the nation each election cycle. If you are going to cheat, you don’t want to do so in local races because the risk is so much greater than at a higher level.
Starts also explaining the extra incentive democrats have to weaken power at the local levels and push it nationally.