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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I will not make you transcribe even more. I will watch the whole video and the day 2 testimony as well, if I can find it, along with further days if they exist (I see the description says day 1, presumably there are more days? I don't see any other days on Viva Frei's channel after searching). But, I will need some time to go through it all. I will probably post my thoughts on it in the next culture war thread in a few days.

Also, is this the trial court's opinion? The date and the judge's name seems to match up, but I want to double check. The trial judge's opinion, and not the appeals court's, is most important here since they are level that deals with matters of fact while appeals courts only deal with matters of law.

Side note: It is incredibly annoying trying to search for a court opinion and only finding news articles talking about the opinion without ever linking to it. So many news articles do not link the primary source they are citing. Side side note: this also makes Wikipedia much worse since you aren't allowed to use primary sources, so you are stuck using high quality secondary sources like news articles that cite the primary source. So, it can be a real headache trying to find the actual source of something on Wikipedia.

Day II can be found at https://youtube.com/live/uahoqdJVc0Q?si=Wu_ZZXF5fR-U8Cx2. There was no day III.

That is the trial courts opinion. I disagree with the judge on the following:

First, there are things that are touched on in the trial that the judge did not allow to be tried. Specifically, there were issues with ballot chain of custody and seals being broken, that in the pre-trial the judge forbade any line of inquiry on. When you listen to the trial recording, you can hear witnesses occasionally mention the seals not being present, but the judge did not permit this to be investigated and does not include it in any of his own rationale. If it was included, it provides another mechanism than voter suppression to affect the election results.

Another thing is that very little time was allowed to investigate and present the case. This isn't like a murder trial that goes on for weeks. The plaintiff's expert was only permitted to review a small handful of ballots in less than a day, the day before the trial. The lawyers only had the night before the trial to assess their strategy based on the evidence the expert provided. They had 0 days to pursue leads that this investigation generated. If there seems to be gaps in their argument, then that makes sense with what they were given and does not indicate there was nothing there inside the gaps, just that they were unable and not permitted to dig further.

The last thing that isn't really explained in the judge's reasoning is that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of the election in the State of Arizona, was also the Democratic nominee for this election. If the Plaintiff is correct, Katie Hobbs directly benefited from the problems in Maricopa County. The Judge writes at the beginning of his opinion that "this Court must presume the good faith of their official conduct as a matter of law" without including any consideration of cui bono.

Now onto the matters of fact. The Judge ignores some of the most credible witness testimony, that of Clay Parikh, because the Judge decided that:

If the ballot definitions were changed, it stands to reason that every ballot for that particular definition printed on every machine so affected would be printed incorrectly.

This is the judge's own opinion on a technological matter. This is not something a witness testified to. I do not know the judge's technical expertise, maybe he became CompTia A+ certified in his spare time. I don't know. I do know some of the expert witness credentials though, and Parikh seemed very competent and very confident.

And Parikh gave two possible explanations for the 19inch issue. One was someone with admin access to the laptop attached to the printer changing settings, one was someone changing the settings on the Election Management System. The judge, in his own technological opinion, ruling out the definitions in the Election Management System (maybe someone made a duplicate definition, and set those to 19 inch, and some ballots were printed out under the duplicate definition and some not), does not rule out an admin changing printer settings, and that this itself could not be an accident because the printer settings were controlled via a script.

Even the things the Judge admits is pretty damning from a "fraud happened here" perspective, but did not supply evidence of violations of the very limited topics the Judge allowed inquiry into. For example, he does not deny that there is evidence that "Runbeck employees were permitted to submit about 50 ballot packets of family and friends into the ballot stream improperly." He claims that this evidence is countered by Maricopa County Election officials being there to supervise and not reporting anything of the sort, but that is equally evidence of Maricopa County officials not paying enough attention to catch fraud or being participants in the fraud. There is a huge element of "We investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing" here.

Lastly, Richard Baris is a poll director who testified to the statistical unlikeliness of how few votes were counted in this election.

Indeed, to the extent that a range of outcomes was suggested by Mr. Baris, he suggested that – with his expected turnout increase on Election Day of 25,000-40,000 votes the outcome could be between a 2,000-vote margin for Hobbs to a 4,000-vote margin for Plaintiff.

He also testified that anything that impacts election day specifically will have a disparate impact on Republican voters who are more likely to vote on election day than vote early.

What my take away from this is, even if Maricopa County is just incredibly incompetent at running elections, this incompetence is indistinguishable from fraud significant enough to sway an election. And if that's the case, how on Earth can we claim that the government is run by the will of the people?

I watched the section you highlighted, and yeah that was bad. The witness to me like someone who knew he fucked up and was trying to give technically correct answers. To play armchair lawyer for a sec, I think the lawyer, rather than trying to get the witness to speculate on why X happened, I might have phrased it as "In a typical scenario what measures are taken to prevent X?"

As far as some of the other anomalies, as a team lead and someone who teaches a lot of board games, you can teach someone something but they don't know it until they've done it. You're in a situation you don't really know how to deal with and you're trying to avert a crisis which leads to more fuck ups. And they can't just do a redo of the election.

An audit definitely seems called for here. Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable. I'm not convinced it was intentional rather than incompetence because that would be pretty damn brazen. It would be very easy to end up with a target on your back.

Who set the machines should be pretty damn traceable.

You think so, but what odds do you want to give on the password for the laptop being a shared admin password that 20+ people know?

I have unfortunately seen a lot of stuff like this while working in IT. There was one school district that stored all parent passwords in the clear on a csv file.