| HN Mirror

> You're starting from the conclusion that the election with mail in voting is verifiable, and then arguing from it.

I'm starting from the conclusion that it carries equivalent risk to in-person voting, based on observation from states that have already had mail-in voting in place for decades (which includes, for example, Pennsylvania; all they changed in the law was opening access to it to more people, they already offered it for those not present in-state during the election and overseas military for decades). Against that mountain of evidence, the counter-argument made a lot of bluster but provided nothing concrete at all that couldn't be dismissed (and their anecdotes were doozies; there's a reason they were either thrown out of so many courts or never actually went to the work to make a case in so many courts). It was a culture-jamming campaign, not an actual complaint, and it attempted to abuse the legal system so hard that the lawyers involved got sanctioned.

> How is that even possible, when the mail in ballots are separated from the envelops?

Myriad ways because every state does something different (which is another weakness of the argument; it assumes conspiracy across unrelated and borderline-hostile-to-each-other actors. Any idea how many Republican-controlled counties would have to be involved for the conspiracy the Trump campaign claimed to have succeeded?). To give examples from the system I know: ballots arrive via mail from the voter. They are checked against the registry for valid voter and confirmed against double-voting by cross-checking the in-person rolls. Once that is done, the ballot (in a controlled environment) is decanted from the outer envelope. At this point, it is an anonymous vote. This is equivalent to the process used in in-person voting where, after confirming the voter may vote, their vote is stripped of any identifying information by filling out a slip of paper and dropping it in a box (and later shuffling the contents of the box so that stacking order can't be used to reverse-solve to original voter).

> How would you prove that a specific ballot was filled out by a specific person, then verify if they confirm that they voted in such a way. This is not possible.

Not only would this run counter to design (of both mail-in and in-person voting), it violates the principle of voter privacy in a big way. Our system is not perfect but it was never designed to be; it balances the interest in controlling against fraud with the interest in anonymizing the vote. Burden of proof is on those who claim the main-in system is worse to demonstrate this; they have failed to do so (and the strategies they've used are, basically, ridiculous). The largest risk vector would be stealing a vote by claiming to be someone else who doesn't show up at the polls; this is not impossible but (spoiler alert) it's not impossible in person either; it's not like we take a DNA sample to figure out if a voter tells the truth when they say they're so-and-so and flash a (forgeable) photo ID.

> and hope the courts would accept it and Judges be willing to challenge to entire system that employs them

This is a major misconception of how the system works. What makes people think judges wouldn't love to prove fraud? What a career-maker that would be! You'd be in the history books! And judges in most positions aren't elected. These sorts of shenanigans are why the American system firewalls judges from public referendum in a lot of contexts. Half of judges hate the executive of their state and would love to embarrass it. But they aren't going to throw their career away backing a dead-horse argument, and the arguments made were dead horses.

> The reason why Trump contestation of the elects was taken seriously by the public

Never make the mistake of assuming the public has enough domain knowledge to be arbiters of what's worth taking seriously; these are the same people who report alien sightings when SpaceX launches a rocket on the west coast.

> huge discrepancy between mail in voting and in person voting in the key precincts

This did happen. It's pretty easily explained by the fact that one political party's Presidential candidate made a big noise about not voting by mail because he believed the mail could be abused (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/rigged-f...). As a result, his followers took his advice and did not vote by mail. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that easily explains the statistical anomaly (while also raising the question of the lack of other statistical anomalies that would have been caused by, say, ballot stuffing or other fraud tactics).

> Trump wasn't going to win the court cases. The same courts told hime before election he had no standing to challenged the rule changes, and after election they told him he should have challenged before the election. Latches and Standing.

The latter part of this is untrue. He does, in fact, have no standing to challenge the rule changes because legislatures make those rules, not the courts. They didn't say he should have challenged before the election; they said you can't use the courts to overturn an election. He never had standing.

What he could do (and should, if he were serious about changing the process, which he is not) is bring specific charges against specific individuals who committed fraud. With all the research he ostensibly did, specific fraud should have been found. This is how our system works because it supports certainty and frequent change over uncertainty of outcome (we've seen what uncertainty does to democracies; it's not pretty). If fraud occurs, identify it, correct it, and make the next election (which is always soon) more secure.

He won't do this. His game is not to improve the integrity of the system; it's to make you doubt it.

> The disbarment of his lawyers is clear retaliation

Retaliation by whom? The Bar is as much GOP-appointed folks as Democrat-appointed folks. Again, believing this requires accepting a vast conspiracy, where the simpler explanation is one man paid a lot of people money to try and break the rules, and the only "retaliation" is the enforcement of those rules. I urge you, if you do not believe this, to follow any of these disbarment proceedings and understand the arguments being made by the judges and/or bar attorneys in question. Legal accreditation is designed to protect against this kind of "The law is what I say it is" nonsense from individual attorneys.

> Trump used Twitter to challenged the election by shifting public opinion

No disagreement there. But that's far more a referendum on Twitter and a (gullible) public than on Trump. I think they were naive about how much damage unchecked speech from authority can do; there's a reason Mussolini nationalized the radio system.

> And when it mattered the most, FBI and Twitter took away his ability to do that.

After cutting him wide latitude for years: yes, I agree. After an attempted coup, they decided to curtail his ability to continue to feed an insurrection against the country. Twitter makes less money when there's a civil war in the US because people will start burning down the datacenters they run in and kill their employees. This isn't a hard incentive structure to comprehend.