Not the judge's fault the Lake team couldn't get one single witness to say they saw direct tampering. At the end of the day, that's on her and her team. Either the legally decisive evidence they claimed to have never existed, or they were unwilling to play the crooked game and risk perjury to push this thing along.
No, it wasn't plain to see. The only evidence was that things had changed. For 1200 ballots. That were flagged and then done by hand so every vote was counted. The state's explanation for the change was an error as a result of IT changing all the settings trying to get the printers to work. Anyone who's worked with printers professionally knows that these machines do not always behave logically, and you sometimes just got to try a bunch of different settings until one of them works. One of those settings is "size-to-fit", which ironically is an option that can make things not fit, because of how the computer recognizes margins.
Kari Lake's team could not come up with any evidence to counter this narrative for why the mistake happened, and again, the mistake was caught and rectified day of. This caused delays which her team complained about, but those delays were a result of publicly appearing to take a problem seriously and take the slow necessary steps to rectify a discrepancy. There's just not much legally here to stand on.
If anything, it's an endorsement for the Oregon system of mail-in only with hand-only count, since that avoids both the problems Maricopa ran into with ballot scanning. But I know y'all hate that.
25 year IT professional here. I work large installation of servers (100k to millions) running banking software including HIPAA, PII, & PCI data.
Stop speaking for us. The IT folks you talking about are incompetent.
You don't go into election and try a bunch of settings until they work. Are you insane? You certify a configuration and use that configuration. There are laws (that apparently aren't followed) that require election to be run of certified equipment and software.
Who had access to make the changes? At whom direction? What exactly was the issue? Etc.
It was a fucking shit show and the judge should see through it.
This is more like a reply that is actually useful to moving toward understanding what the issues really are. I hope there's a thoughtful and honest reply. In good faith.
I just feel like people are so bad at managing their emotions that if they think someone isn't passing the latest purity test or showing the proper amount of "virtue signals" they call names, spit judgement, and move on. And all the intelligent discussions that don't get to happen leave folks like me remaining naive to so much.
This I am IT and I worked for my local elections for 15 years. We had steps to follow and everything we did was recorded and written down. And if there was anything that wasn't on your follow manual then you had to call central. You never just tried different settings until it worked.
A shit show isn't against the law. Doesn't matter if the judge sees through it, being a judge is about being a human robot who interprets pre-written code, not about trusting your gut or your best judgement. Yes, being a judge is less about personal judgement and more about making sense of hundreds of years of legal writing and decisions and making a choice that doesn't break the edifice.
The printer wasn't working. If the printer isn't printing, you don't just sit around and not print out any ballots. You try and fix it. Especially since "there were delays" was about the only solid evidence the Lake team could muster. You... you claim to be an IT professional and then apparently mix up certification and configuration. Certification doesn't lock in configurations, and I know of no law that mentions specific printer settings like fit-to-screen.
And yes, you do go into an election and try printer settings until they work because you have hordes of people who refuse to use mail-in-voting but also get very upset if in-person voting takes longer than they wanted waiting right there. You don't just refuse to print out some people's ballots because an unexpected printer error happens (which is why voting should be a paper process with a hand-count, but then all the date fetishists on here would get mad) - are you insane? You do whatever you can to get these people's ballots printed out! So their vote can be counted!!
And then when you do, and it still doesn't work, you keep working at it until eventually those votes are counted, while someone else stops the printer error from repeating itself. Which is what happened. Yet again, I must remind you that the 1200 ballots were counted, so there's the entire failure to establish harm as well. I'm sorry, but 1200 votes being counted a few hours later than intended is not a shit show. It's more evidence in favor of handcounts, but it's no disaster.
The best argument that could be made was delays cause lines to swell, and it's possible potential voters see the line and balk or decide to leave the line before voting. Since the Lake team only really had that batch of 1200 in the most densely populated county they couldn't prove anything was widespread and thus systemic. And really, since mail-in voting was available and advertised, "the line was too long" is not a valid excuse to the judicial world which currently holds mail-in voting as acceptable. If you didn't block out the whole day to secure your vote, that says more about you than it does about Kari Lake or her evidence.
Also, it's really hard to prove that someone intentionally tried to throw the election when the only evidence is one handful of ballots that were counted. If it was an evil plan, that's a shit evil plan that doesn't accomplish anything. Occam's Razor says its a heady mixture of human and machine error. Which is why we should have hand counts and not digital ballot scanning. Any money y'all want to spend would be better spent on ballot initiatives (or pressuring state legislature if that's what's needed in Arizona) to remove machines from the voting process, and not tossed away on a hopeless legal case with zero legs to stand on.
The way judges are supposed to work is they are allowed to be human and have emotions and be sympathetic to ideas, narratives, and zeitgeists. But they must put those sympathies aside - the onus is on the plaintiff to bring arguments and evidence that will work within the established legal framework. Lake's team failed to do that, and they couldn't even get one person willing to perjure themselves for a higher cause! That last bit was really my main point - the Lake team came apparently unprepared to play ball in the light or in the shadows. Smells to me like Cyber Ninjas fishing for a quick buck all over again.
What about the chain of custody laws that were not followed? And many other anomalies that came to light during the trial. Even if a specific person could not be held out as the one who threw the election it does seem there was enough evidence to show that the possibility of a incorrect outcome of this election is possible. Justice was not served here, IMHO.
You said it right there. You, you said it. In your post. And then concluded with "justice was not served here". Amazing.
Sorry, but damn, you are not good at this. You just said the evidence showed "The possibility of an incorrect outcome of this election is possible." THAT'S NOT ENOUGH. Possibility is conjecture! That is not enough in our current legal framework. The evidence has to show that an incorrect outcome happened, not that it's possible. You might not like that morally/spiritually, but that's legally how the law works.
The law was served correctly in this case. The judge made the correct decision with the evidence, or lack thereof he was given. That of course doesn't mean justice was necessarily served, but if you expect the law and justice to always be on the same page, I've got some dry land on the Florida coast to sell you. Cheap.
Then take the word "possibly" out and conclude that if the law is broken then the vote count can not be relayed on to be accurate. It is so obvious to most people commenting here and everywhere else that the judge got this wrong. Keep defending his actions like you know the law so we'll, but it really just makes you sound like a troll.
Not the judge's fault the Lake team couldn't get one single witness to say they saw direct tampering. At the end of the day, that's on her and her team. Either the legally decisive evidence they claimed to have never existed, or they were unwilling to play the crooked game and risk perjury to push this thing along.
I don't agree at all.
The evidence of tampering was plain enough to see. Plain enough that not to see it took some heavy-duty willful blindness.
That they didn't have that "one guy" to pin it all on was bullshit.
And when they do get that "one guy" to pin it all on, the goalposts will shift again.
And keep in mind, most of what we know about what went on was filtered through media and talking heads.
No, it wasn't plain to see. The only evidence was that things had changed. For 1200 ballots. That were flagged and then done by hand so every vote was counted. The state's explanation for the change was an error as a result of IT changing all the settings trying to get the printers to work. Anyone who's worked with printers professionally knows that these machines do not always behave logically, and you sometimes just got to try a bunch of different settings until one of them works. One of those settings is "size-to-fit", which ironically is an option that can make things not fit, because of how the computer recognizes margins.
Kari Lake's team could not come up with any evidence to counter this narrative for why the mistake happened, and again, the mistake was caught and rectified day of. This caused delays which her team complained about, but those delays were a result of publicly appearing to take a problem seriously and take the slow necessary steps to rectify a discrepancy. There's just not much legally here to stand on.
If anything, it's an endorsement for the Oregon system of mail-in only with hand-only count, since that avoids both the problems Maricopa ran into with ballot scanning. But I know y'all hate that.
25 year IT professional here. I work large installation of servers (100k to millions) running banking software including HIPAA, PII, & PCI data.
Stop speaking for us. The IT folks you talking about are incompetent.
You don't go into election and try a bunch of settings until they work. Are you insane? You certify a configuration and use that configuration. There are laws (that apparently aren't followed) that require election to be run of certified equipment and software.
Who had access to make the changes? At whom direction? What exactly was the issue? Etc.
It was a fucking shit show and the judge should see through it.
This is more like a reply that is actually useful to moving toward understanding what the issues really are. I hope there's a thoughtful and honest reply. In good faith. I just feel like people are so bad at managing their emotions that if they think someone isn't passing the latest purity test or showing the proper amount of "virtue signals" they call names, spit judgement, and move on. And all the intelligent discussions that don't get to happen leave folks like me remaining naive to so much.
Good job Anon. Carry on.
This I am IT and I worked for my local elections for 15 years. We had steps to follow and everything we did was recorded and written down. And if there was anything that wasn't on your follow manual then you had to call central. You never just tried different settings until it worked.
A shit show isn't against the law. Doesn't matter if the judge sees through it, being a judge is about being a human robot who interprets pre-written code, not about trusting your gut or your best judgement. Yes, being a judge is less about personal judgement and more about making sense of hundreds of years of legal writing and decisions and making a choice that doesn't break the edifice.
The printer wasn't working. If the printer isn't printing, you don't just sit around and not print out any ballots. You try and fix it. Especially since "there were delays" was about the only solid evidence the Lake team could muster. You... you claim to be an IT professional and then apparently mix up certification and configuration. Certification doesn't lock in configurations, and I know of no law that mentions specific printer settings like fit-to-screen.
And yes, you do go into an election and try printer settings until they work because you have hordes of people who refuse to use mail-in-voting but also get very upset if in-person voting takes longer than they wanted waiting right there. You don't just refuse to print out some people's ballots because an unexpected printer error happens (which is why voting should be a paper process with a hand-count, but then all the date fetishists on here would get mad) - are you insane? You do whatever you can to get these people's ballots printed out! So their vote can be counted!!
And then when you do, and it still doesn't work, you keep working at it until eventually those votes are counted, while someone else stops the printer error from repeating itself. Which is what happened. Yet again, I must remind you that the 1200 ballots were counted, so there's the entire failure to establish harm as well. I'm sorry, but 1200 votes being counted a few hours later than intended is not a shit show. It's more evidence in favor of handcounts, but it's no disaster.
The best argument that could be made was delays cause lines to swell, and it's possible potential voters see the line and balk or decide to leave the line before voting. Since the Lake team only really had that batch of 1200 in the most densely populated county they couldn't prove anything was widespread and thus systemic. And really, since mail-in voting was available and advertised, "the line was too long" is not a valid excuse to the judicial world which currently holds mail-in voting as acceptable. If you didn't block out the whole day to secure your vote, that says more about you than it does about Kari Lake or her evidence.
Also, it's really hard to prove that someone intentionally tried to throw the election when the only evidence is one handful of ballots that were counted. If it was an evil plan, that's a shit evil plan that doesn't accomplish anything. Occam's Razor says its a heady mixture of human and machine error. Which is why we should have hand counts and not digital ballot scanning. Any money y'all want to spend would be better spent on ballot initiatives (or pressuring state legislature if that's what's needed in Arizona) to remove machines from the voting process, and not tossed away on a hopeless legal case with zero legs to stand on.
The way judges are supposed to work is they are allowed to be human and have emotions and be sympathetic to ideas, narratives, and zeitgeists. But they must put those sympathies aside - the onus is on the plaintiff to bring arguments and evidence that will work within the established legal framework. Lake's team failed to do that, and they couldn't even get one person willing to perjure themselves for a higher cause! That last bit was really my main point - the Lake team came apparently unprepared to play ball in the light or in the shadows. Smells to me like Cyber Ninjas fishing for a quick buck all over again.
What about the chain of custody laws that were not followed? And many other anomalies that came to light during the trial. Even if a specific person could not be held out as the one who threw the election it does seem there was enough evidence to show that the possibility of a incorrect outcome of this election is possible. Justice was not served here, IMHO.
You said it right there. You, you said it. In your post. And then concluded with "justice was not served here". Amazing.
Sorry, but damn, you are not good at this. You just said the evidence showed "The possibility of an incorrect outcome of this election is possible." THAT'S NOT ENOUGH. Possibility is conjecture! That is not enough in our current legal framework. The evidence has to show that an incorrect outcome happened, not that it's possible. You might not like that morally/spiritually, but that's legally how the law works.
The law was served correctly in this case. The judge made the correct decision with the evidence, or lack thereof he was given. That of course doesn't mean justice was necessarily served, but if you expect the law and justice to always be on the same page, I've got some dry land on the Florida coast to sell you. Cheap.
Then take the word "possibly" out and conclude that if the law is broken then the vote count can not be relayed on to be accurate. It is so obvious to most people commenting here and everywhere else that the judge got this wrong. Keep defending his actions like you know the law so we'll, but it really just makes you sound like a troll.