Proof? Who Needs Proof?

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It’ll have to be short today, but … this is fascinating. See Aaron Blake at WaPo, The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud.

Executive summary: The Trump Team is still claiming voter fraud, but they admit they have no proof. Get this:

Rather than claiming evidence of proven fraud, it instead claims that the fraud is actually “undetectable,” because election officials made it so by doing illegal things. And that’s why it wants the results overturned.

“Despite the chaos of election night and the days which followed, the media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven,” the lawsuit says (and that proclamation is accurate). “But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”

Those sneaky election officials! Including the Republican ones! But Miz Lindsey has proposed that the Republican officials were conned by Stacey Abrams into doing these illegal things. Back to Aaron Blake:

“Whatever doubt there is about fraud by voters or political operatives,” it says, “there is no doubt that the officials of the Defendant States changed the rules of the contest in an unauthorized manner.”

It’s certainly a novel legal strategy, but it’s also one that reflects the last-ditch nature of the effort. The Trump team has spent weeks asserting that it could prove fraud or has proved fraud. It hasn’t — and in many cases lawyers like Giuliani have been forced to admit in court that they aren’t alleging actual fraud in specific cases — so now the argument is that this is beside the point. The real point, it seems, is that fraud could have occurred but that we might never see it because elections officials made it that way.

The arguments that there was fraud include the claim that no presidential candidate has lost both Florida and Ohio and won the presidency (see: John F. Kennedy, 1960). Also, ” It ridiculously suggests that late vote shifts in key states were astronomically improbable — to the tune of 1 in 1 quadrillion — a claim which Philip Bump dispatches here.”

See also:

David Cohen, Rolling Stone, Trump’s ‘Big’ Texas Supreme Court Lawsuit Is Just as Fake as All the Others

Charles Pierce, Esquire, The Confederacy of Dunces Wants to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans

 

22 thoughts on “Proof? Who Needs Proof?”

  1. What is so hard to understand?  In Federal Courts, the absence of evidence of a conspiracy is proof of a conspiracy AND the absence of evidence of voter fraud is proof of voter fraud!  The Donald told me so!

    For those attacking Rudy as being out of his mind – he is really just preparing his insanity defense for when the indictments and arrest warrants show up at his doorstep.

  2. They don’t need proof. See Adam Serwer, If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote Is Fraudulent

    …The Michigan protester’s declaration that Trump won the election (by a landslide, no less) falls into the same category. The majority of people who make such declarations understand that in fact, Trump did not win, that he received fewer votes than his opponent, and that the Electoral College result reflects that loss. But they support Trump’s claims that the vote was fraudulent, and his efforts to pressure Republican officials in key states to overturn the result. To Trump’s strongest supporters, Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with, and because the Democratic Party is not a legitimate political institution that should be allowed to wield power even if they did.

  3. In one form or another, our long "Cold Civil War" is rapidly heating up.

    And there will be blood.

    I never root for blood, but if there has to be blood, I hope it's not the "little people" who get spill it, but the big, rotten fish at the top: the tRUMP KKKLAN, Rudy, Miss. Lindsey, Mitch, Cruz, Paul, and House RepubliKKKLANS!

    Also, most, if not ALL of these seditious and treasonous traitorous co-signers to the Texas suit in front of the SCOTUS, are lawyers who swore to uphold the Constitution.

    When will they be sanctioned??

    When will they be disbarred?!?

    Take away their law licences!!!!!

    Let them walk the streets, begging for work of some sort. 

    The letter "T," for "Treason," invisible on their foreheads and attire, but still reputationally visible to every fellow citizen who, upon seeing them, knows that there on the street begs a seditious, treasonous traitor.

     

     

     

     

    • There may be blood. But events are conspiring to give us a reprieve. It's much like an enemy attacking a fort, but being repelled, reprieving those in the fort. They'll be back. Things to be hopeful about:

      • Trump will be out of La Casa Blanca Jan 20, intelligent people will be in.
      • People will be getting vaccinated, soon. Most of the country by mid-summer. Dolts who refuse the vaccine will be laughed at.
      • The economy will explode (according to UCLA).

      In short, the mean ugly people will be pushed back under their rocks, at least for awhile. The positions of the powerful are about to be changed come Jan 20, and it will take some time for everything to shake out. A reprieve.

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  4. What is it with these mean and cruel people? They’re saving the craziest and meanest stuff for the end:

    – pardoning cronies
    – setting records for killing people on death row
    – undoing more environmental regs

    •  setting records for killing people on death row

      So many people to kill, and so little time!

       I'm ambivalent about the death penalty, but what strikes me as really sick is the urgency that Trump is placing on the need to execute inmates on death row before he leaves office. It shows me that what Trump is doing doesn't have anything to due with justice or upholding the law ( and mercy never enters into the equation). It's all about his reinforcing an image as a law and order president and using human lives to do it. 

      Another sick aspect is the fact that he focused on executing white inmates while the George Floyd protests were going on, and now that things have slowed down in respect to public outcries of racial injustice, he's now making sure that black inmates don't escape his law and order campaign. To the white supremist Trump supporters its on parallel in one aspect to the Wedding Feast at Cana… where like the good host Trump has saved the best for last.

  6. So, they're kinda-sorta twisting the rules of obstruction of justice here.

    "Funny" how when they ACTUALLY obstructed justice on multiple thoroughly documented occasions, their response was "it doesn't matter WHY you have no case; you have no case."

    Of course, here they have no evidence. But then, facts and evidence have always been a problem for them.

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  8. I guess it takes the Supreme Court to rule on nonsense these days.  Oh how dismal things have become.  Let us just conclude that if they ever had a case they have certainly drank it and much more by now. 

     

     

    • That's actually a strategy the right will be using more and more. They aim to lose at the lower courts, so they can get the case kicked up to the Supreme Court, with its 6:3 conservative tilt.

  10. moonbat,

    Thank you for being you.

    You always calm me down when I go into my Chicken Little mode.

    ?To maha,}

    For some reason, I'm never able to respond directly to anyone.  I always have to treat a response as a new comment.  I don't know why, and nothing I've tried worked.  

    ?To all my beloved fellow commenters,

    Does anyone else have the same issue?  And if you did, were you able to respond directly, and how?

    • You mean like this?  To  answer to me directly hit the reply next to the thumbs up.  You should get a Reply to Bernie heading.

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  11. The proof you say, Sidney Powell has the proof except for a few problems it seems.  In an exclusive story the Washington Post discredits her "intelligence expert" who she references in this alleged proof:

    Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former “Military Intelligence expert,” and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims. In a declaration filed in four states, Spyder alleges that publicly available data about server traffic shows that voting systems in the United States were “certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.”

    Spyder, it appears, only went to intelligence school for a while and did not complete the training.  He never served as an intelligence agent, rather he served commendably as a mechanic the article reports.  

    So I contend, the modus operandi  is to decide on the conclusion you want first and to develop the "proof" after that.  It is a cart before the horse process that is normally considered ill advised.  

    Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.  The link follows:

    Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence – The Washington Post

  12. Somebody needs a pardon. This is the speculation why Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas mounted the ridiculous lawsuit to get the SCOTUS to overturn other states’ elections.

    Ruth Ben-Ghiat speculates that the hundred or more Republican legislators that are in cahoots with this whole campaign, are likewise getting phone calls, pressure to join or else.

  13. Here's some more of the crazies… Well, maybe not total crazies if you consider the old adage… Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

    On Saturday morning, aggrieved Trump supporters are set to rally outside the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Department of Justice’s headquarters. Their plan: to simultaneously march around and blow shofar horns in the hopes that the building’s walls will collapse, just like the biblical walls of Jericho.

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  14. Bernie:

    Oh what a tangled web we weave

    When first we practice to deceive;

    But since experience makes us wise

    We soon grow skillful in our lies!

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  15. Bernie, 

    That "Reply" tab doesn't work for me.

    When I try, my reply ends p on the bottom of the comments.

  16. Bernie,

    Yes, I do.

    But I can't type anything in it.

    I can, however, put in my name and e-mail.

    And when I put them in, the comment field is still locked.

    And if I hit enter then, the next screen tells me to go back to fill-in the comment.

    And when I do, it registers as a new comment at the bottom of the other comments.

    OY!!!!!

     

    • That is way beyond my pay grade.  You get the screen but it won't let you type into it.  I have no ideas.

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