Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

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This appears to be some sort of "technicality" narrative that's being used to quickly and without effort/discussion dismiss the election fraud claims arising from the witness affidavits. The affidavits exist, representing people that claim to have witnessed certain things.

So in a reasonable society with good discourse, we should be saying "wow, that looks serious, so many people claim they witnessed crimes." followed by "let's all do our best to get these infront of a court/judge, or get the government entities investigating it so they can be resolved/dismissed formally".

Instead, we get information suppression/dismissal on the part of Youtube and news outlets, and internet lawyers dismissing things because "it hasn't gone in front of a court yet". Come on man, let's solve this and either dismiss them fully or get them investigated. Otherwise we're just perpetuating "conspiracy theories" and then turning around and complaining about how half the population believes in conspiracy theories.

Stop. Just stop.

There have been dozens of cases submitted to various courts.

Those courts evaluated the evidence presented and dismissed the cases out of hand. What do you think the court does when it dismisses a case? Do you think it just randomly chooses cases to dismiss?

Don't pretend that hasn't happened. Don't conflate what is playing out in the media and what has happened in the court system.

So who am I supposed to argue with here? The other guy that said "affidavits aren't evidence because they haven't been submitted to courts", or you that say that "things have been submitted to various courts and dismissed". Which one is it?

Either way, I'm not going to stop arguing for reasonable discourse and getting to the bottom of things.

Why can't both be true?

The "other guy" said this: Affidavits are not evidence until they're presented to a court. [emphasis mine]

There have been so many court cases tossed out (50+ if some accounts are to be believed, but that's just hearsay) , one of two things has to be happening:

1) The affidavits never made their way into court as evidence, likely because the plaintiff lawyers didn't want to put them forward as such, or

2) The affidavits were presented in court as evidence and got discounted because they're too weak as evidence

But the common thread appears to be that these "affidavits" don't stand up to any strong scrutiny, and amount to "random person alleges they saw fraud happen", which then quickly changes to "random person alleges they believe they saw fraud, but couldn't state for sure" when under penalty of perjury.

Both of these are true.

There are affidavits. They have not be submitted to courts. But this is not because Trump and friends have been prevented from doing so. Instead they have chosen not to submit this material. So cases have been tossed for lack of any factual evidence. These affidavits are reasonably declared "not evidence" because when offered the chance to get a court to look at them the legal team has instead skipped it.

Most of these dismissals have come before evidence is considered. There are dozens of reasons to dismiss cases without considering evidence.

There is a bucket load of evidence that shows election irregularities and failures of election staff to follow laws, but that does not mean there is enough evidence to prove the Trump campaign's allegations in court.

Also, a lot of the cases getting bounced are seeking emergency relief which often requires a higher standard of proof/evidence which is usually hard to come up with before discovery.

Also, even if the allegations are proven, there may not be a legal remedy that a court is willing to offer -- this can be grounds for early dismissal too. If you ask for something the court thinks it cannot offer, case dismissed no matter what the evidence is. Often if legal remedy is unavailable courts will point to the electoral process as the remedy.

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