Election 2020

Discussion in 'Free Speech Alley' started by Tiger in NC, Jul 26, 2020.

  1. Winston1

    Winston1 Founding Member

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    Latest on the Maricopa ballot recount is pretty sad. Seems even supporters are calling it botched. They even locked out the one professional auditor recently. Now it’s been shown that $5.7 million in funding has come from the likes of Sidney “kraken” Powell and Mike “traitor “ Flynn. Like the rest of Trump’s claims this is showing to be nothing but bread and circuses for the Trumpsters.
    'Botched': Arizona GOP's ballot count ends, troubles persist

    Arizona Republicans’ partisan review of the 2020 election results got off to a rocky start when their contractors broke rules for counting ballots and election experts warned the work was dangerous for democracy.

    When the auditors stopped the counting and returned the ballots this week, it hadn't gotten better. In the last week alone, the only audit leader with substantial election experience was locked out of the building, went on the radio to say he was quitting, then reversed course hours later. The review's Twitter accounts were suspended for breaking the rules. A conservative Republican senator withdrew her support, calling the process “botched.” And the lead auditor confirmed what was long suspected: that his work was almost entirely paid for by supporters of Donald Trump who were active in the former president’s movement to spread false narratives of fraud.

    All this came nearly 100 days into a process that was supposed to take “about 60 days," according to the Senate Republicans who launched it. And it's not over yet. Contractors are now producing a report on the findings that could take weeks or more to write.

    The turmoil casts even more doubt on the conclusions of what backers describe as a “forensic audit" but what experts and critics say is a deeply flawed, partisan process.

    “Not even a shred of being salvaged at this point,” said Sen. Paul Boyer, the first Republican state senator to publicly come out against the audit in May. “They’ve botched it at so many points along the way that it's irrecoverable.”

    Boyer's opposition became less lonely last weekend when another Republican, Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, one of the Legislature's strongest advocates for stricter voting laws, agreed that “the Trump audit” was “botched.” Along with all 14 Democrats, a majority of the Senate, which commissioned the audit, is now against it.

    “I wanted to review our election processes and see what, if anything, could be improved,” Ugenti-Rita wrote on Twitter. “Sadly, it's now become clear that the audit has been botched.”

    The review includes a hand count of ballots, the analysis of voter data and a review of ballot-counting machines. It's being led by Cyber Ninjas, a software security consultant with no election experience before Trump began trying to overturn the 2020 results. Its owner, Doug Logan, has supported the movement to spread false conspiracies about the vote count in battleground states.

    On Wednesday night, Logan ended months of silence about who was paying him when he said a whopping $5.7 million had been contributed by political groups run by prominent Trump supporters including Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne and correspondents from One America News Network. The figure dwarfs the $150,000 to be paid by the Senate.

    Logan has said he was approaching the review objectively and his own views are irrelevant. Still, Logan appeared in “The Deep Rig,” a conspiratorial film claiming the election was stolen from Trump. The filmmakers were given access to restricted areas of the ballot-counting operation, including the secure area where ballots were stored.

    The review's integrity took another hit when former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, a Republican whose experience in elections lent credibility to the operation, found himself locked out of the building where the audit was underway because he'd given outside election experts data without authorization, he said.

    Bennett told a conservative talk-radio host that he was quitting because he was expected to rubber-stamp the findings. Later the same day, he said he was not quitting after all. Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, agreed Bennett “will have full access to all audit work spaces, procedures, and data.”

    When the Cyber Ninjas’ hand count of ballots didn’t match the county’s official tally, a third count was ordered, this time using paper-counting machines to tally the number of ballots but not the winning candidates. The findings have not been released.

    Meanwhile, the timeline for a final report, most recently expected in late July, has continued slipping.

    Supporters of the effort blame stonewalling by Maricopa County. The county's Republican leaders refuse to cooperate, saying “competent auditors” have everything they would need to fully review the vote count.

    “It is unfortunate that the county has been recalcitrant,” Republican Sen. Warren Petersen, chair of the Judiciary Committee that issued subpoenas, said recently. “That doesn’t breed trust. It slows things down. It makes things difficult.”

    Twitter this week suspended audit-related accounts, including the Arizona review's official account and several others seeking similar reviews in other states. A Twitter spokesperson said the accounts were suspended “for violating the Twitter rules on platform manipulation and spam.”

    The U.S. Justice Department has weighed in, warning any state that is looking to conduct an Arizona-style review that they will need to follow federal law that requires officials to retain and preserve election records, including ballot and ballot materials, for 22 months.

    Earlier, Justice Department officials had alerted Arizona officials of the federal requirement. At this point, the Justice Department has not taken any public action beyond the letter. A Justice Department spokesperson this week declined to comment further.

    “It’s being purported as though this effort is going to build confidence in our elections, when we know that that is not the motivation behind any of this,” said Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and a former Maricopa County elections official. “Because if that was the case, then they would tell the truth.”

    The operation got off to a rocky start on day one. A journalist pointed out that workers were using blue pens in violation of a fundamental rule of election administration. Blue and black pens are strictly prohibited near ballots because those are the colors voters are told to use, creating the potential for workers to manipulate the count.

    Days later, a former Republican state lawmaker who lost his reelection bid — and who would have been a Trump elector to the Electoral College had Trump won — was among the workers counting ballots. The auditors chased conspiracy theories, for a time shining ultraviolet lights to look for watermarks on ballots and taking high-resolution photographs to look for evidence, such as bamboo fibers in the paper, that fraudulent ballots from Asia were slipped into the stack.

    “The audit process and its eventual results may be utilized to undermine popular confidence in our electoral system nationwide, thereby enabling the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans,” said Ralph Neas, a civil rights attorney and advocate who wrote a report on the audit's flaws for The Century Foundation. “These are existential threats to our democracy and they have to be stopped in their tracks.”

    ———

    Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed to this report.
     
  2. onceanlsufan

    onceanlsufan Founding Member

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    Who to trust! .... and then, is this writer for the AP unbiased and honest? Don't know. Though I will say, it would seem to me that we should have some verifiable information by now. There was something about 74000 unverified mail-in ballots, but I haven't seen any follow up on that.
     
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  3. Winston1

    Winston1 Founding Member

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    This from a Trump appointee.
    ‘The stuff of which violent insurrections are made:’ Federal judge punishes Colorado lawyers for 2020 election lawsuit

    A federal judge in Colorado has disciplined two lawyers who filed a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election late last year, finding that the case was “frivolous,” “not warranted by existing law” and filed “in bad faith.”

    In a scathing 68-page opinion, Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter found that the lawyers made little effort to corroborate information they had included in the suit, which argued there had been a vast national conspiracy to steal the election from President Donald Trump.

    He particularly called out the duo, Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, for quoting Trump in their legal filing, which cited a presidential tweet that claimed without evidence that voting machines manufactured by the company Dominion Voting Systems had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.” Neureiter called that allegation “highly disputed and inflammatory” and said the lawyers made no efforts to verify it.

    ‘A propaganda tool’ for Trump: A second federal judge castigates attorneys who filed a lawsuit challenging the 2020 results

    The two lawyers filed the case as a class action on behalf of 160 million American voters, alleging a complicated plot engineered by Dominion; Facebook; its founder Mark Zuckerberg; his wife, Priscilla Chan; and elected officials in four states. They had sought $160 billion in damages.

    The case was dismissed in April, but Neureiter ruled that the attorneys had violated their ethical obligations by lodging it in the first place and by peppering their motions with wild allegations that they had made little effort to substantiate. Legal rules prohibit attorneys from clogging the court systems with frivolous motions or from filing information that is not true.

    Calling the suit “one enormous conspiracy theory,” Neureiter ordered that the duo must pay the legal fees of all the individuals and companies they had sued — 18 separate entities in all — as a way to deter future similar cases.

    Neureiter ordered the defendants to compile records showing how much time they had spent on the case and their typical billing rates to determining how much the two lawyers will owe.

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    “In short, this was no slip-and-fall at the local grocery store,” wrote Neureiter, who was appointed as a magistrate judge by other judges. “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”

    While the lawyers attached affidavits from various people who alleged the election had been rigged — a common tactic of Trump supporters in the dozens of challenges filed in the months after the election — Neureiter said a close examination of the testimony showed it was “notable only in demonstrating no firsthand knowledge by any Plaintiff of any election fraud, misconduct, or malfeasance.”

    Neither Fielder nor Walker immediately responded to an email about the order. During a hearing last month, they argued that they had a good-faith belief that the election was stolen and that they did not trust government officials and others who had affirmed there was no widespread fraud. Fielder told the judge that when they filed their case in December, they saw the potential for violence stemming from discontent over possible fraud and thought their suit offered an alternative path for resolving concerns.

    “We’re peaceful people. We wanted to come to court and resolve it in a peaceful way,” he said. “What happened on January 6 was exactly what we predicted in the complaint.”

    Wednesday’s order came as the judicial system nationally has been grappling with how to hold accountable the lawyers who filed flimsy challenges to the election.

    In June, a panel of judges in New York suspended the law license of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, arguing that Trump’s personal lawyer had “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements” that amounted to an ongoing threat to the public. Giuliani’s lawyers have said they are confident his license will be restored after a hearing.

    Last month, a federal judge in Michigan spent nearly six hours skeptically questioning a group of nine lawyers, including pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, as she sought to determine whether to sanction them over a lawsuit that sought to overturn President Biden’s win in that state. A ruling is expected in that matter soon.

    Other disciplinary actions are pending before a Wisconsin judge and in front of bar associations in multiple states.
     
  4. Kikicaca

    Kikicaca Meaux

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    "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Ralph Waldo Emerson
     
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  5. Winston1

    Winston1 Founding Member

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  6. LSUpride123

    LSUpride123 PureBlood

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    Every day you reference Trump he wins jackaroo
     
  7. kcal

    kcal Founding Member

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    LSUpride123 likes this.
  8. LSUpride123

    LSUpride123 PureBlood

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    I am most amused by the sudden caring for “rules” when all the rules were ignored “during” the election.


    As they say, and then?
     
  9. Kikicaca

    Kikicaca Meaux

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    Let's see. Biden opens the border allowing hundreds of thousands of illegals in our country from Mexico and pretty much anywhere. At the same time Covid is coming back with the potential to affect our economy in a negative way. Biden is sending illegals with Covid all over the country spreading more Covid that will further harm job growth and hurt our economy. Now Biden at the same time is trying to institute policies and regulations to further hurt businesses. Along with this he is attacking the domestic oil and gas industry that will destroy even more jobs.

    With all this said thousands of legal citizens will start losing their jobs. Now we are adding thousands of illegals to our country stressing our schools, hospitals and social order. Lastly as inflation takes hold the economy gets worse what will the hundreds of thousands of illegals going to do? Where will they work? Will they take the few jobs available from legal Americans? What we will wind up with is millions of illegals with no work. Will they turn to crime to survive? Add to this police moral is at an all time low because of people like Biden so who will the citizens turn to?

    Ahhhhhhh Winston any snappy long winded eloquent comebacks?
     
  10. Winston1

    Winston1 Founding Member

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    What does that have to do with the utter failure to turn up evidence of fraud in the election? Seems you forgot where you’re posting. This is about the election not the failure of the Biden presidency.
     

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