There are a lot of false claims of election fraud floating around. But there are also serious issues that are being investigated in all the battleground states. The GBI is now actively working to investigate various issues in GA ( https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/gbi-assisting-secretary-of-state-in-handling-election-investigations ): "Ag…
There are a lot of false claims of election fraud floating around. But there are also serious issues that are being investigated in all the battleground states. The GBI is now actively working to investigate various issues in GA ( https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/gbi-assisting-secretary-of-state-in-handling-election-investigations ): "Agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will help the secretary of state investigate the hundreds of open cases related to the 2020 election. .. Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that his office had around 250 open investigations related to the election. These elections included possible double voting, absentee ballot fraud, and other allegations."
In general, it is bad policy to allow an organization to investigate themselves. Raffensperger and the GA SS-officials have been claiming for months that the election is clean and if it is proven not to be, they will either look incompetent or corrupt, which suggests they have a conflict of interest in stopping any effort to find extensive election fraud. Consequently, they have made every effort to avoid signature verification and/or to allow a forensic analysis of voting machines. In a very real sense, if one is not allowed to evaluate the evidence, there is no reason to expect that issues with the evidence will be found.
There were cases in other states that did turn up invalid signatures. For example, in AZ "a handwriting analysis expert [was] retained to look at 1-2 percent of the 1.6 million early ballots submitted in Maricopa County, which would be 16,000 to 32,000 ballots. He also wanted access to all duplicated ballots, a number that Maricopa County election officials pegged at around 20,000.
1) The case filed by Congressmen Kelly and Sean Parnell is headed to the Supreme Court with a deadline of 9 am tomorrow for PA to respond to the claims that no-reason mail-in-ballots violated the PA Constitution. Basically, the PA Constitution does not permit a change like mail-in-ballots to be put into effect until after it passes the legislature on both sides of a general election, which was not done in this case. The PA Supreme Court did not rule on whether this was a constitutional violation, but simply rejected the complaint because of the doctrine of laches, which means that the complaint was filed too late. But Ted Cruz and others have pointed out a Catch-22 issue since if the complaint was filed before the general election, it would have likely been tossed because no injury had yet occured. In other words, the PA Supreme Court found the perfect way to make an unconstitutional law constitutional. Given Altio has set a deadline for PA to submit a defense, it is very possible that SCOTUS will take a dim view of that Catch-22 argument. One of the options SCOTUS has may be to invalidate all the EC votes of PA since if all mail-in-ballots were unconstitutional according to PA law, meaning the PA election was unconstitutional and it should not impact the EC count ( https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/12/06/justice-alito-advances-by-one-day-and-several-hours-the-deadline-for-pennsylvania-to-respond-my-speculation-as-to-why-n290251 ). Another alternative is for SCOTUS to give the election to Trump, since without unconstitutional mail-in ballots, he clearly won. But as SCOTUS rulings are unpredictable, the safest approach is to not try to guess their opinion for what to do (Including nothing) before making dogmatic claims about what the ruling will be.
2) It is pretty clear that PA election law intends to allow meaningful observation of vote counting but that in PHL, this was not permitted. There are a number of issues related to a multitude of votes that fit this category. The issue is not so much that fraud has been proven, but that Trump observers were denied their legal right to observe counting and signature verification for hundreds of thousands of votes, effectively allowing fraud to be hidden behind virtual closed doors. In addition, there were something like 15K voters who showed up to vote and were told that they had voted already, which suggests some kind of fraud was involved. The primary reason these cases seem to have been rejected is for lack of standing, which doesn't mean the claims are invalid, but rather that the claimants have no legal right to present their case before the relevant court. If these types of cases make it to SCOTUS, we will see what the justices have to say about this issue.
To the best of my knowledge, only the Pennsylvania case was decided on laches (unwarranted delay) grounds, and that is the case where the plaintiffs argued that they likely lacked standing prior to the election. In other states, I believe the election challenges were all rejected for lack of evidence.
"Within the allegations of the 64 page Complaint the Trump campaign claims they have witness testimony for the courtroom that will identify “illegal” votes in the following numbers:2,560 felons66,247 underage voters2,423 votes from people not registered1,043 individuals registered at post office boxes4,926 individuals who voted in Georgia after registering in another state395 individuals who voted in two states15,700 votes from people who moved out of state before the election40,279 votes of people who moved without re-registering in their new countyAnother 30,000 to 40,000 absentee ballots lacking proper signature matching and verification"Just because some fraud claims are false, it doesn't mean these fraud claims are false as this data has been accumulated over the course of a month instead of being rushed out. Perhaps these claims are also in error, but court cases that reject hearing evidence based on lack of standing do not evaluate the integrity of evidence. If Shippedwreckcrew of RedState.com is correct (he is a former federal prosecutor), this evidence will evaluated in a court of law, with witness testimony and cross examination:
"Under the Georgia election code, these issues are now subject to a courtroom trial where documentary evidence will be presented, and witnesses will testify and be cross-examined. A Judge will make a determination as to each claim. That outcome can then be appealed through the regular appellate process." My view is that evidence needs to be evaluated before adapting a "nothing to see here, only a small amount of routine election fraud was present in this election. People do get away with murder and just because they are not convicted it doesn't mean the murders didn't take places. The same is true of massive election fraud given the limited time to find it and the ability of election authorities to resist looking at the evidence.
Do you dispute my claim that Raffensperger and the election officials involved have a lot to lose if extensive fraud is found, as at a minimum it would suggest they were incapable of running a fair election. If so, should they not legitimately excuse themselves from evaluating fraud claims to allow an independent investigation? If not, why not? This is not an argument that fraud was present. It is an argument that people responsible for ensuring large-scale fraud was not present should not be investigating (or preventing the investigation) of whether large-scale fraud was present.
There are a lot of false claims of election fraud floating around. But there are also serious issues that are being investigated in all the battleground states. The GBI is now actively working to investigate various issues in GA ( https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/gbi-assisting-secretary-of-state-in-handling-election-investigations ): "Agents with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will help the secretary of state investigate the hundreds of open cases related to the 2020 election. .. Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said that his office had around 250 open investigations related to the election. These elections included possible double voting, absentee ballot fraud, and other allegations."
In general, it is bad policy to allow an organization to investigate themselves. Raffensperger and the GA SS-officials have been claiming for months that the election is clean and if it is proven not to be, they will either look incompetent or corrupt, which suggests they have a conflict of interest in stopping any effort to find extensive election fraud. Consequently, they have made every effort to avoid signature verification and/or to allow a forensic analysis of voting machines. In a very real sense, if one is not allowed to evaluate the evidence, there is no reason to expect that issues with the evidence will be found.
There were cases in other states that did turn up invalid signatures. For example, in AZ "a handwriting analysis expert [was] retained to look at 1-2 percent of the 1.6 million early ballots submitted in Maricopa County, which would be 16,000 to 32,000 ballots. He also wanted access to all duplicated ballots, a number that Maricopa County election officials pegged at around 20,000.
Instead, Warner [the judge] agreed to let Ward and Wilenchik’s expert look at 100 envelopes and 100 duplicated ballots." This was later updated to add another 1526 ballots. Of these ballots, the expert found 9 errors (or .5%), of the ballots that were already counted as passing signature checks. This error rate would amount to 8K invalid ballots being counted in AZ, which is far greater than the small amount of election fraud issues that Erick is willing to admit. See these articles for details ( https://www.azmirror.com/2020/11/30/judge-allows-ward-to-examine-handful-of-ballots-in-attempt-to-overturn-election/ and https://www.azmirror.com/2020/12/03/examination-finds-maricopa-ballot-errors-didnt-affect-presidential-outcome/ ).
1) The case filed by Congressmen Kelly and Sean Parnell is headed to the Supreme Court with a deadline of 9 am tomorrow for PA to respond to the claims that no-reason mail-in-ballots violated the PA Constitution. Basically, the PA Constitution does not permit a change like mail-in-ballots to be put into effect until after it passes the legislature on both sides of a general election, which was not done in this case. The PA Supreme Court did not rule on whether this was a constitutional violation, but simply rejected the complaint because of the doctrine of laches, which means that the complaint was filed too late. But Ted Cruz and others have pointed out a Catch-22 issue since if the complaint was filed before the general election, it would have likely been tossed because no injury had yet occured. In other words, the PA Supreme Court found the perfect way to make an unconstitutional law constitutional. Given Altio has set a deadline for PA to submit a defense, it is very possible that SCOTUS will take a dim view of that Catch-22 argument. One of the options SCOTUS has may be to invalidate all the EC votes of PA since if all mail-in-ballots were unconstitutional according to PA law, meaning the PA election was unconstitutional and it should not impact the EC count ( https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/12/06/justice-alito-advances-by-one-day-and-several-hours-the-deadline-for-pennsylvania-to-respond-my-speculation-as-to-why-n290251 ). Another alternative is for SCOTUS to give the election to Trump, since without unconstitutional mail-in ballots, he clearly won. But as SCOTUS rulings are unpredictable, the safest approach is to not try to guess their opinion for what to do (Including nothing) before making dogmatic claims about what the ruling will be.
2) It is pretty clear that PA election law intends to allow meaningful observation of vote counting but that in PHL, this was not permitted. There are a number of issues related to a multitude of votes that fit this category. The issue is not so much that fraud has been proven, but that Trump observers were denied their legal right to observe counting and signature verification for hundreds of thousands of votes, effectively allowing fraud to be hidden behind virtual closed doors. In addition, there were something like 15K voters who showed up to vote and were told that they had voted already, which suggests some kind of fraud was involved. The primary reason these cases seem to have been rejected is for lack of standing, which doesn't mean the claims are invalid, but rather that the claimants have no legal right to present their case before the relevant court. If these types of cases make it to SCOTUS, we will see what the justices have to say about this issue.
To the best of my knowledge, only the Pennsylvania case was decided on laches (unwarranted delay) grounds, and that is the case where the plaintiffs argued that they likely lacked standing prior to the election. In other states, I believe the election challenges were all rejected for lack of evidence.
In Fulton County, GA this is the set of fraud claims filed in a recent Fulton County lawsuit ( https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/12/05/trump-campaign-files-georgia-election-contest-right-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-fulton-county-n289861 )
"Within the allegations of the 64 page Complaint the Trump campaign claims they have witness testimony for the courtroom that will identify “illegal” votes in the following numbers:2,560 felons66,247 underage voters2,423 votes from people not registered1,043 individuals registered at post office boxes4,926 individuals who voted in Georgia after registering in another state395 individuals who voted in two states15,700 votes from people who moved out of state before the election40,279 votes of people who moved without re-registering in their new countyAnother 30,000 to 40,000 absentee ballots lacking proper signature matching and verification"Just because some fraud claims are false, it doesn't mean these fraud claims are false as this data has been accumulated over the course of a month instead of being rushed out. Perhaps these claims are also in error, but court cases that reject hearing evidence based on lack of standing do not evaluate the integrity of evidence. If Shippedwreckcrew of RedState.com is correct (he is a former federal prosecutor), this evidence will evaluated in a court of law, with witness testimony and cross examination:
"Under the Georgia election code, these issues are now subject to a courtroom trial where documentary evidence will be presented, and witnesses will testify and be cross-examined. A Judge will make a determination as to each claim. That outcome can then be appealed through the regular appellate process." My view is that evidence needs to be evaluated before adapting a "nothing to see here, only a small amount of routine election fraud was present in this election. People do get away with murder and just because they are not convicted it doesn't mean the murders didn't take places. The same is true of massive election fraud given the limited time to find it and the ability of election authorities to resist looking at the evidence.
Do you dispute my claim that Raffensperger and the election officials involved have a lot to lose if extensive fraud is found, as at a minimum it would suggest they were incapable of running a fair election. If so, should they not legitimately excuse themselves from evaluating fraud claims to allow an independent investigation? If not, why not? This is not an argument that fraud was present. It is an argument that people responsible for ensuring large-scale fraud was not present should not be investigating (or preventing the investigation) of whether large-scale fraud was present.