policywonk98 said:
Kansas Kid said:
policywonk98 said:
Not a big fan of Lake, but what is the limiting principal here?
Bush was called a war criminal for years by high profile people. If he was more in the public eye I imagine people would still level that charge at him.
Stephen Richter is an elected official. How far does this go here? Are we hopeful we get to the point in this country where nobody is allowed to question elections or say what they want about any elected officials?
I'm pretty sure there are already countries out there like this. They certainly aren't countries I want to live in.
On the flip side. The GOP grassroots needs to move on from anyone that is not focused on the future and smarter about attacking election fraud.
I will leave up to the lawyers as to one is public enough to have a higher standard to meet. Clearly, Presidents of both parties have been called a number of things that are libel and untrue. Could they sue, maybe but I think it would hurt their image more than any monetary award they could get.
People need to be able to question elections but I think the key is to have proof and not just throw up everything and see if it sticks. The Trump wing has started claiming stolen election months before every election including in places where the electoral officials are mostly Rs
I agree Republicans need to work on the grassroots get out the vote efforts. Continuing to repeat 2020 was stolen is a losing strategy as shown time and time again in elections across this country. People want to hear what candidates are going to do if elected not whining about the past.
Your trust in the justice system is certainly admirable. I wish it was worthy of my trust.
In terms of having proof on charges that are leveled against public figures. Shouldn't trust in the courts work in reverse? If the charges are leveled then shouldn't the court take up the case without severely narrowing the scope of the case so much that the plaintiff can't even use the information they believe will prove the charges they are making. I seem to recall that is what happened here between Lake and Richter. Lake isn't actually just saying things, she is taking people to court, but once in court the judges are ruling that they have to make their case without using XY or Z. When lawyers argue that those are things that we need to see to make our case, the judge is dismissing the case because their is no evidence.
How can there be accountability on the election system if people arguing for transparency are blocked from the transparency? Richter was the one arguing against the release of information surrounding signature verifications. Maybe things are on the up in up. Im personally unconvinced that lifting the hood on signature verifications inside the context of a properly conducted investigation will have a "chilling" effect on people signing their ballots in the future. Sounds a lot like the argument against showing an ID to vote. People fighting for universal suffrage and no voting restrictions whatsoever sure seem to have an uncanny knack for also arguing against total transparency of the very system they want in place.
It doesn't help matters when the judge is at a Stone Age level on understanding how computers work. I watched that trial. Lake's lawyers were not that great but her witnesses were solid and knowledgeable in their field and on the facts to the extent they were able to get discovery, which Maricopa County and now Governor Hobbs fought tooth and nail against.
Lake's expert, Parikh, was scrupously honest in that he could not say definitively how a 19 inch image wound up on a 20 inch ballot page because he didn't witness someone doing something but by process of elimination, that change had to be coded in the ballot definition pdf files. Even Maricopa Couny's expert, Ryan Macias, alluded to that in his carefully scripted testimony that he was obviously reading during his testimony by zoom. His eyes were to the side of the camera and he spoke in complete sentences using the same phrases multiple times. Lake's lawyers objected that Macias was obviously reading from a prepared statement but the judge let it go. (Incidentally, although there was no video proof but people rported seening Macias actually at the courthouse on the day of his testimony, so he was zooming in to the hearing from another room in the courthouse apparently.)
Ultimately, Judge Thompson decided to punt the case and dimiss it because Lake and her lawyers could not give him a name of who did it and that it was done on purpose. Which was the wrong question in my mind.
The 2022 AZ election was so screwed up, in so many manners, the results could not be trusted. Whether it was by design or just a massive case of incompetency should not matter.
