RE: *** Official 2020 Election Thread ***
Since this is primarily a sports board, I will offer the following analogy. If President Trump's legal challenge to the election was a football game, he's down 84-0 at the end of the 3rd quarter. Every offensive possession he's had has ended in a turnover or a 3 and out. His offense has only a handful of plays for positive yardage, and none longer than 3 yards.
His problem is that virtually all of his arguments are factual rather than legal ones. Judges can decide legal arguments without any evidence. They can be appealed quickly and ruled on at the appellate level. Factual arguments require proof. If he weren't asking for injunctive relief (asking the court to stop things where they are), his lawyers could allege facts based on "information and belief," and could seek discovery on questions like whether dead people voted or ballots were disposed of or changed. However, to get injunctive relief, you must demonstrate at the outset that when the case is over, you are more likely than not to win. You therefore must have that evidence in hand right now, not wait to find it later.
His legal team has presumably thrown their best evidence at the courts and has had almost every request thrown out. It's difficult to imagine what new information he could find.
It's notable that all five states that flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020 are controlled by Republican legislatures. They established the rules for the election. In Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, those legislatures decided that counting of absentee ballots could not begin until election day. At least two of these states, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, considered bipartisan bills to allow the counting to begin early, but Republicans, encouraged by the Trump campaign, declined to enact such bills, leading to the long wait for ballots to be counted. It is also well demonstrated that registered Democrats are far more likely to vote early, a trend enhanced by President Trump's encouragement of Republican voters to do so in person. Had the ballots been counted early and the included in the results released on election day, as they were in Florida for instance, Biden's wins would not have appeared to to be a comeback.
This is to say that President Trump to some extent engineered, but has also mischaracterized, a well anticipated event, tagged by some as the "red mirage," i.e., the late counting of the ballots, to create apparent support for his argument that the election was somehow rigged. However, he loudly signaled his intent to make this argument ahead of time, meaning that he knew in advance that most of the late counted ballots would be from registered Democrats, and indeed helped make it happen.
Finally, President Trump's public arguments regarding the potential for election rigging are easily disproven. All of the methods of fraud that he hypothesizes have been well considered by election administrators and have been protected against. No absentee ballot is accepted for counting without it being associated with a registered voter, signature checked. Once voted, that person cannot vote again. People simply cannot vote twice. If you request an absentee ballot, your name is tagged so that if you show up at the polls, you cannot vote unless you turn in your absentee ballot for destruction. If you don't bring it, they allow you to vote a provisional ballot that will only be counted if your absentee ballot is never received. States regularly undertake purges of deceased voters from the rolls. If widespread theft of absentee ballots were going on, there would be widespread complaints of not receiving ballots. If there were targeted destruction of mailed ballots, it would show up in disproportionately small return of ballots. With all of these controls in place, it is not even vaguely surprising that the Trump legal team has been unable to come up with any meaningful evidence of fraud.
If anything, voting in person by machine would seem to me the most vulnerable to tampering. If the machine is electronic, its software could be tampered with. If it is connected to a network, that network could be attacked. It is clearly preferable that all voting be done by paper ballot even if tabulated electronically. That way it can be audited or recounted by hand as they are doing in Georgia. Absentee ballots are all paper ballots and can be recounted easily.
(This post was last modified: 11-17-2020 03:32 PM by orangefan.)
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*** Official 2020 Election Thread ***
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