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by drdeca 1950 days ago
If you remove the putting of stupid words in others’ mouths from this (great going there, btw), the only thing that remains is “but the courts could have not gotten the evidence”.

But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it. You have to explain why people claiming it have enough evidence to believe it, but the courts don’t have enough evidence for it to be even claimed in the courts, if you want to claim that the reason is that courts don’t have access to the evidence.

1 comments

>But if the evidence is not available, then there is no good reason to believe it.

Based on this statement, I am guessing you are an American, and are therefore accustomed to all relevant hard evidence always being available. What you may not know is that in the rest of the world, sometimes some hard evidence is not available, so those people have adapted other mechanisms for forming beliefs about what is true. One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

For instance, in those countries, if a man who has professed a strong desire for wealth is tasked with guarding a large pile of money, and the money disappears, people in those countries will infer that the man likely took the money, even if no one saw him take it and the money is not later found in his possession.

> One such mechanism is the use of reason to draw inferences from other relevant facts.

The “other relevant facts” are called “evidence”. An observation is evidence for a proposition when the posterior probability for the proposition, after updating on the observation, is greater than the prior probability of the proposition, before the observation.

Ok, so I guess you are saying that the evidence is not __legally considered__ evidence, or isn’t “evidence” in the legal sense of the term, and that that is why it wasn’t presented it court?

I have to admit that I’m not particularly clear on what kinds of evidence are and aren’t considered “evidence” in the legal sense admissible in court. Are you familiar with the criteria that make the distinction?

In a bench trial, the judge is supposed to weight the evidence presented, and issue various different degrees of relief based on whether it meets certain standards in totality. For a case where the plaintiff is asking the judge to overturn the result of an election, the judge would require a rather high standard of evidence.

I was talking about hard evidence specifically -- think a smoking gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it. According to what I have been lead to believe, if election fraud happened in the US, sufficient evidence of said fraud would be discovered and presented to American courts, though that is not the case in other countries.

Therefore if I have not been mislead, when a person considers whether there was election fraud in the US, they should only consider whether sufficient evidence has been presented to courts or to the media, not whether there exist other lesser forms of evidence.