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Notes -
I read those threads with some interest. While I cannot claim to be an expert of the law, I found that Meshkout seemed to very much have the better of the argument, and I think it's a very good thing that he kept hammering the point for months and years afterward.
It's very easy for culture war issues to cement falsehoods as common knowledge. We never really achieve certainty on most of the questions we discuss here, and on a question as complicated as election fraud it's very easy for arguments to proliferate far faster than they can be answered, until false certainty arrives by something approximating a distributed Gish Gallop. My Recollection is that Meshkout was trying to fight this tendency by focusing on the specific questions brought to court, and by returning to those questions with periodic updates as they worked their way through the legal system. While this is not a perfect answer to the question of election fraud, it's about the best approach I can imagine to the best-defined subset of the question.
If you or others disagree, I'd be fascinated to read an effortpost on the subject.
I chased down a lot of the fraud claims, and a few of them were actually valid -- they were definite things that deserved follow-up and investigation because either the people running the election did a weird thing or someone else did a weird thing to them.
But neither side seemed to want to talk about them! Instead the stop-the-steal people wanted to keep on bringing up stuff about supposedly-legit poll monitors being barred from supposedly-legal videotaping, stuff it is trivial to show is against election law. IT is just Duke LaCrosse with a different polarity.
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