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by qwerty12345678 1977 days ago
You're referring to Hitchens's Razor, which I believe is a flawed mindset that's used selectively as it suits people. The situation here is that the proof is very well hidden, and therefore the situation has been rendered un-falsifiable. This is now essentially a Russell's Teapot[1] statement.

I'd say when people start storming the US Capitol, it's time to stop ignoring the underlying issue. Why are you so afraid of confirming the facts via evidence? I think the clear answer is that you're afraid it might not be what you want to hear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

4 comments

Isn't it your claim that proof is well-hidden and hence any argument to the contrary will just trigger the same defence that it is even more well-hidden? Which means, you are making an un-falsifiable statement and the burden of proof is on you.

As another person replied, the evidence for "voter liberation" has been evaluated in the court and found lacking.

PS: Which is another sad thing.. that the claims are fraud are really that they allowed more legal voters to vote. Such a pitiful state of democracy.

Because these claims were brought to court and dismissed without evidence. Quit concern trolling you know they were bullshitting and so does every other person with even the slightest technical background.
Since you bring up technical backgrounds, how do you feel about the voting machines having logs erased for 2020 but not 2016? And would you be against analyzing all election machine logs related to server-activity/internet-usage/usb-activity/code-execution-activity/etc? If you really claim that they were bullshitting, why is everyone so afraid to release that data? And not question why it was deleted?

Giuliani was jockeying for time trying to dig up more hard evidence. He apparently wasn't able to find enough in time, and judges didn't want to get involved for political reasons.

How about you show me a single credible source that backs up your claim the logs were deleted? Quit being dishonest, or worse spreading ignorance by accident.
Here's the forensic report from Allied Security Operations Group. Michigan politicians did everything in their power to keep this hidden, but a judge ultimately released it. This story was blackballed by MSM and censored on social media.

https://depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michi...

It's too difficult to decide credibility with the limited information we have and so the best thing to do is to look at opposing arguments to see which thing makes the most sense logically. In that respect, here is (I believe) the report which shows the numbers put out by the machine are not reliable, at least, and also gives evidence that 2020 log files were deleted whereas 2016 log files were not: https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Mi...

Next, we know the state's mouthpiece will try to refute that handily, so we take a look at such an article, from Michigan itself:

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/14/m...

In particular, pay attention to the confounding of two separate issues to discredit the above forensic report:

> The group previously claimed there were six precincts with more than 120% turnout in the state's election. But its data was incorrect, according to publicly available turnout numbers.

"The group" did not make such claims or at least I could not find any, it was the affiant who did and he is management at the company. I could not actually find the source material on this so I am trusting the article.

Anyway, what is important is what was NOT refuted in the article.

Because, quite possibly, there is where efforts should be focused. These pieces of presumably factual evidence should be refuted by an adversarial party but are not and are just left to be memory holed.

I have not yet found anything specifically refuting the forensics report above. Simply news articles confounding things in what appears to be an effort to discredit findings. Not that I've looked too hard, mind you.

So I'm still wondering... why are 2020 logs missing while 2016 logs remain? Why do the machines give different numbers for the same votes?

These are important questions. Do not think we'll get an answer though.

And for the record, I always found Bush's Diebold election fishy.

>We reviewed the Tabulation logs in their entirety for 11/6/2020. The election logs for Antrim County consist of 15,676 total lines or events. Of the 15,676 there were a total of 10,667 critical errors/warnings or a 68.05% error rate.

>The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.

The first one sounds like they're looking at warning logs the program outputs. Those could be startup logs completely unrelated to ballots. The percent of your program's log lines that are warning logs cannot be in any way compared to the Federal Election Commission guidelines on how often a ballot can be miscounted.

Yes, when I heard that there was a report of "68%" error rate from the machines, I was a little surprised. Then when I heard it came from comedian Russell Ramsland, I thought: "Oh, I bet he did something like count all the messages in a log file and divide that by the number of ballots counted". And sure enough...

It's like the telephone scammers that try to dupe old people into giving them access to their PC by convincing them that they have a virus. Their proof? Get the trusting boomer to open the Windows Event Viewer, which on pretty much anybody's PC is replete with trivial warnings and errors. Then pretend that means something is terribly, terribly wrong.

This doesn't come down to Hitchen's razor, or any other etiquette of debate or rhetoric. It is simple innocence until proven guilty. Asserting fraud is making an accusation that crimes occurred, and the burden of proof is not on the accused.

The idea that the proof is too well hidden is itself un-falsifiable, as any amount of effort to find proof, if it doesn't exist, can simply be dismissed as "well it's just too well hidden".

If you are starting from an assumption of guilt, then sure: any lack of evidence will always appear to be evidence that is well hidden. If you assume guilt then it is practically axiomatic that lack of evidence really means it's well hidden.

Storming the Capitol does not change the burden of proof. The underlying issues have also been addressed in a few dozen failed court cases. By all means examine the evidence, but actually have some: saying you can't because it's too well hidden is not a rational approach.

"Innocence until proven guilty" is relating to an individual being formally accused of a crime in a court of law. We are talking about a PUBLIC PROCESS, which in my opinion doesn't fall into the same category. The burden of proof shouldn't fall on either side, it should be publicly verifiable.

If a third-world country controlled by rebels ran a "free and fair" election, where they "counted" the presidential ballots behind closed doors and eventually determined that the rebel dictator won the election....then by your logic, it would be absurd and unfair of the citizens to question those election results.

Also, here's some evidence you can look into that should have been enough to trigger more formal investigations: https://depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michi...

It's trivial to find analysis of the flaws in the Antrim report you linked.

We have also already had a public process. President Trump exercised all avenues to prove himself the winner, deprived via fraud. They went through public courts and public scrutiny. His own prior commission on voter fraud disbanded without significant findings of similar levels of fraud he alleged occured during 2016.

What public process would you propose when private investigators, the courts, and an administration eager to prove its claims of fraud did not find anything worthwhile? When the head of the department of justice and a strong Trump supporter said claims of fraud on any relevant scale were BS?

At some point the demand for a "public process" begins looking like paranoia, when every failure to find anything significant is used to bolster the claim "that just means it's really well hidden".

When you're using the lack of evidence as justification for your claim, no public process will ever satisfy you if it doesn't confirm your assumption.

Every time the states did something to check the integrity of the election, such as hand-recounting the ballots, or doing a signature verification audit, it was simply dismissed out of hand as a cover-up and not a real investigation.

The bar set by the "stop the steal" crowd was that unless you uncovered that Donald Trump really won the election, you didn't investigate hard enough.

Russell’s teapot doesn’t fit in this case. Paper ballots exist. Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand).

Are there actually claims of miscounted votes that you feel were miscounted or incorrectly treated that you feel are verifiable? (And haven’t already been refuted via evidence)

> . Many were manually recounted (whether by optical scanner or by hand).

My understanding is that in several places the envelopes in which the ballots were sent were allegedly prone to irregularities and the ballots have been extracted anyway and the envelopes disposed of, so recounts would by default take in account faulty/incomplete ballots if this actually happened. (no idea if the claim is true, however)

>envelopes disposed of

Are envelopes generally involved? In the Antrim County dispute[1] it sounds like they use Image Cast Precinct (ICP) tabulators[2][3]. This[4] appears to be a video of one in use[5], and it doesn't seem to involve an envelope. If there's 100% mail-in voting then yes every ballot would have an envelope. But if there's any less than 100% then there will be less envelopes than ballots, so I'm not sure envelopes would be too useful for recounts.

[1] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/14/m...

[2] https://www.michigan.gov/documents/ag/SOS_Benson_Response_An...

[3] https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Mi...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4l3eKRJv4

[5] https://verifiedvoting.org/election-system/dominion-imagecas...

I forgot to touch on this in my reply...If what I mentioned in my reply did in fact occur, you now understand why "recounts" wouldn't make any difference.