The Lies that Can Undermine Democracy (You Said a Mouthful)

While I understand that many people distrust the mainstream press, the fact that his lawyers have filed a blizzard of lawsuits and got precisely nowhere, proves that there is no evidence for the election failures that he claims. But his denial of the result has created a belief among his supporters that he didn’t really lose, a belief that is likely to further poison our society in the coming years.

Source: The Lies that can Undermine Democracy

This is self-incrimination of the sin of only reading news from one side. There’s absolutely not “no evidence” of election fraud. There are many, many stories of irregularities, and the fact that they all seem to go in favor of Biden is, in my opinion of fact, worth filing a lawsuit or two about. And the two statistical analyses I’ve noted are smoking guns of interference, in my opinion.

Trying to search for actual results, I found this WashPo article, which seems to be common among the legal wrangling that is actually recorded about these cases:

“Something far more fundamental than the winner of Wisconsin’s electoral votes is implicated in this case,” Hagedorn wrote, in declining to hear a case brought by a conservative group that asked the court to overturn the election results. “At stake, in some measure, is faith in our system of free and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic.”

In this particular case, the judge seems to have simply refused to hear the case out of the fact that it would be unprecedented. I suppose that’s a legal reason?

The other references I can find seem to all point to the problem of “standing.” The federal courts seem to find that the President of the United States has no standing to bring suit against a State legislature in federal court, and toss the case, and that certainly seems to be a reasonable position to take. However, it’s a catch-22. As a petitioner, he has no standing in State courts, except the one in which he might be a permanent resident, which, in this case, is New York, and of no interest in these matters.

Even in the case that went before the Supreme Court, the suit was brought from Texas, and the court found that they had no standing to sue the other 4 States for their handling of their election results. I find that entirely reasonable as well. But it leaves an interesting gap in our legal system. How is any Presidential candidate supposed to seek injunctive relief in a federal election? It doesn’t seem to be possible.

The trouble with pointing at the failed efforts of those lawsuits as proof of their lack of merit is that all of the lawsuits (that I can see) have been thrown out without investigation of their actual claims. It’s hardly conclusive. As I said before, I’d really love to see an in-depth investigative documentary about all of this. There’s just no reasonable way to put all of this together through a bunch of disconnected news articles, blog posts, and Twitter rants.

Anyway, Fowler is a well-respected person amongst programmers, and he prattles on for many pages after this complete disregard for the actual, unsettling facts which he tacitly ignores, and I’m sure it’s a lengthy screed against the alt-right, and blah, blah, blah. It’s just hard for me to take anyone seriously any more who only ever looks at the eye chart with their left eye.