11-30-2020, 10:20 PM
(11-30-2020, 01:48 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: CNN provides a quick version of why there is a big difference between what Trump and company present to Fox and thus the public and why the legal team has not tried to present it to a judge in court.
CNN Wrote:Donald Trump desperately wants you to believe the only reason Joe Biden won the 2020 election by so many votes was because it was the "most fraudulent election in history." Trump served up his latest variation of this fallacy on Fox Business on Sunday morning, saying "we have so much evidence" to support his claims but the judges "won't allow us" to submit it.
That's a lie. The truth is Trump's lawyers have had numerous opportunities to present the so-called evidence of voter fraud, but haven't. Why? Simple. There is no such evidence. Trump's own lawyers -- including Rudy Giuliani -- have repeatedly admitted in court cases from Arizona to Pennsylvania that they are not even alleging voter fraud in those lawsuits. The obvious reason being they can't prove the claims.
There's a difference between what a client can scream in public and what a lawyer can say to a judge. As a lawyer myself, I know how it's drilled into our heads from law school that you could be disbarred if you intentionally lie to a judge. We have a "special duty as officers of the court" to be truthful to the court.
The only way in which this election could be fraudulent is an assumption that practically anyone not voting for Donald Trump, the Great and Infallible Leader (in his... whatever) voted fraudulently. Cull enough votes in the right places, and Trump wins -- even winning the greatest landslide of all time as even the District of Columbia votes for him because votes for Joe Biden are disqualified.
The argument that I saw was that if the only votes that mattered were those made on Election Day were valid, then Trump would win. In effect, absentee and early votes (necessary for accommodating the unusual circumstance of a pandemic so that people could vote safely) would not be valid.
It has been the norm to accept that all valid votes are equal, and that the only non-valid votes are those that prove to be duplicates (a provisional vote that someone might make if not certain that he had voted before or that his mail-in vote would not arrive in time to be counted should the other ballot reach the polling place in time) or might be disqualified, as after the death of a voter before the election. A vote means just the same irrespective of age, race, gender, religion, gender orientation, income, where one is registered to vote, or even something so silly as being a cat owner or dog owner. A vote means just the same whether cast in person on Election Day or absentee. It counts just the same whether it is counted properly at 8:21 PM EST in Bad Axe, Michigan or at 3:15 PM in Detroit on the next day.
All states have strong controls for preventing electoral fraud. One can register as many times as one wants just in case, but one gets only one vote. If you register to vote in Traverse City and then decide that because you want to vote in Ann Arbor while living at or near the University of Michigan, then your registration in Ann Arbor disqualifies your previous registration in Traverse City. The count of votes made and the count of actual ballots must be damn close, or there will be an investigation. The old trick of stuffing a ballot box or fabricating votes on a machine -- or on the other hand, causing votes to disappear -- is no longer easy. The sorts of controls that apply to cash balances of a Fortune 500 corporation have been adapted to our elections so that they be free and fair... and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Donald Trump thinks that he is so wonderful that hardly anyone could vote against him. That's how things are in North Korea... and how it was for a time for the likes of Enver Hoxha, Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Saddam Hussein. I don't know whether he got the idea from the fellow who sent such beautiful letters to him from North Korea... that he ought to get 100% of eligible people voting for him; after all, in his mind he is so great that he deserves such.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
