In response to Dominion's defamation attorneys contacting them and explaining what was likely to be up, American Thinker has issued a complete public retraction and apology to them, including the following:
These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.
I think they are still not fully in the spirit of apology, however, as their front page simply has the word "Statement" at the top of one of its list of articles. If you weren't looking for it, you might not click on it. Reason's Jacob Sullum has commentary.
Powerline reader Matt Mashburn, a member of the Georgia State Election Board has something related to say about the vote dump there.
16 comments:
I mean he wouldn't actually know if they're false anyway. Nobody's managed to get access to the things that would tell you if they were.
There are more videos out of Fulton County on the internet. More evidence; not proof. This one may be for the historians; it may be that in 2077, they'll feel as free to pronounce on it now as we do on Nixon v. Kennedy. Won't happen soon, though.
Police didn't stop rioters all summer; prosecutors wouldn't prosecute the ones who did manage to get arrested. The FBI blew this off, and so did SCOTUS. The Capitol Police have 2,000 members, and didn't put enough of them on hand at the Capitol to stop Buffalo Hat from cruising into the Senate chambers. The National Guard now has two divisions deployed in DC, but won't issue them ammo because the Biden administration doesn't trust the Joes -- they're asking the NG to produce evidence of which troops are GOP voters or have donated to GOP candidates.
That doesn't imply a big conspiracy tying it all together. One isn't necessary. Maybe the whole thing is just falling apart. Maybe none of it works anymore.
Also, if you track back to the piece the Powerline link is responding to, you'll find out that many of the claims are in fact documented. They're consent decrees (like Georgia's) that were ratified by a court between an executive branch and someone suing it, bypassing the legislature.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/did-the-democrats-steal-the-presidential-election.php
Georgia definitely this too, both in the Presidential and the Senate runoffs. As I've mentioned at my place, Georgia law forbids people voting in a runoff who didn't vote in the general. The Abrams organization registered more than 100,000 new voters between 3 Nov and the Senate runoffs. The state gave them ballots for those people, allowed them to be filled out remotely, and dropped off at pickup boxes -- where no one encountered the alleged voter to check their ID or signatures.
The real question is why it's so important to believe the race was legitimate. We know Nixon v. Kennedy wasn't; we know about Tammany Hall. We can see the cascade failures of police and prosecutors all year; we can see that our capital city is currently under military occupation, and that they're still running background checks on the troops because they're afraid even of our own Joes.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/01/12/after-deadly-capitol-riot-army-looking-at-which-troops-require-security-screening-ahead-of-biden-inauguration/
Obviously nothing is working like it should work. Why should this? Why believe, in this of all hours, that everything is normal and above-board?
Interesting that none of those articles quote any of the election experts defending Dominion. I'd love to hear from them.
The right could have held the Senate if people hadn’t stayed home because they were convinced the election was fraudulent. We shot ourselves in the foot.
Grim: As I've mentioned at my place, Georgia law forbids people voting in a runoff who didn't vote in the general.
Federal law supersedes state law when it comes to federal elections. See NAACP v. Georgia 2017.
Z:
I literally mentioned the consent order you’re citing. It’s not law in the sense of a duly executed legislative act passed by the people’s elected representatives — no legislature was consulted about this. It’s an agreement between the activists and Kemp, blessed by a court.
As the Powerline article I cited notes, Federal/state is not the issue. A state court could have blessed off on the agreement too.
In any case the law against voting in the runoff if you hadn’t voted in the general was not repealed. Anyone who did was still breaking the law; but no mechanism to check still exists. Abrams didn’t even pretend she wasn’t registering new voters of this type.
Grim: It’s not law in the sense of a duly executed legislative act passed by the people’s elected representatives — no legislature was consulted about this.
It's actually part of the Georgia constitution. A federal court ruled that Georgia violated federal law by not allowing registration during the period before the runoff election.
Grim: In any case the law against voting in the runoff if you hadn’t voted in the general was not repealed.
You just had to be eligible in the general, not actually having voted. In any case, Georgia can enforce the provision for state and local races, but not for federal elections.
Re: the consent decree. It was known as "sue and settle" When the EPA was sued by certain environmental groups. Also used elsewhere as a APA-avoiding pathway to one's objective policy.
Search on "sue and settle tactics" for additional info.
I know the tactic. What is your evidence that it is in play here?
Raffensperger challenging Warnock in 2022 would be an ... interesting coincidence.
AVI: "I know the tactic. What is your evidence that it is in play here?"
I think ColoComment may have been playing off my cited article from Powerline, which was the one to which your cited article was responding. Here's the relevant text:
"In a number of states, including my home state of Minnesota, the Democrats pursued a coordinated strategy of collusive litigation to eliminate electoral safeguards. In Minnesota–and the same thing occurred in a number of other states–the Democratic Party recruited plaintiffs to sue the Democratic Secretary of State, asking that the statutory requirement of witness signatures on mail-in ballots be eliminated. The requirement of a witness signature is, as a practical matter, the only speed bump on the way to fraud in mail-in voting, so the Democrats wanted to get rid of it.
"Of course Secretaries of State have no power to change election laws, hence the need for collusive litigation, which is one of the most sinister forms of corruption in today’s world. In Minnesota and other states, the Democratic Secretaries of State immediately 'settled' the lawsuits brought 'against' them by their fellow Democrats. The 'settlements' simply agreed to what the Democrats wanted–no safeguards to prevent fraud in mail-in voting.
"The Democrats knew how corrupt, and therefore likely to fail, this tactic was, so in my state they made sure they had two bites at the apple. They recruited two sets of plaintiffs, one in federal court and another in state court, thereby dodging res judicata if they lost the first case. The key to collusive litigation is that the “settlement” conspired at by the supposedly adverse parties is ratified by a court. In Minnesota, the federal court refused to approve the Democrats’ fraudulent “settlement,” finding no showing to justify it. But a loyal state court judge went along with the Democrats’ charade. As a result, mail-in ballots in Minnesota, as in a number of other states following similarly corrupt litigation, bore no witness signatures, in plain violation of state law. The door to fraud was wide open, as the Democrats intended."
Z: "You just had to be eligible in the general, not actually having voted."
I looked this up, and you're half right. The law specifies that you had to have been duly registered to vote for the general, and not found ineligible; but not that you had to have voted. However, registering to vote after the general and then voting in the runoff is still illegal. No legislature changed that law; it was done by a consent decree of the kind being discussed above, which involves the executive and the judicial but not the branch that actually has lawful authority to alter election legislation.
https://codes.findlaw.com/ga/title-21-elections/ga-code-sect-21-2-501.html
@ Grim - but that doesn't apply to American Thinker. It is plausible that Dominion is writing a lot of threatening letters to get people to retract and can't really back up their case. But they look like they have a case here, and I don't see any evidence they are using that strategy. I would be interested if there's something out there, of threatened suits against a score of sources with varying degrees of evidence, for example. But I need more than "They might be doing X."
I agree that Dominion has a defamation case insofar as anyone has been saying, "Dominion did X, Y, Z." As far as I can tell, nobody's succeeding in laying hands on the kind of evidence you'd need to make definitive claims about what happened with the Dominion systems.
On the other hand, it's not defamation to print something that says, "Professor X says that he believes Y was done," nor "Concerns among industry experts Z and W run that these things could have been done," nor, "Video evidence from Fulton County appears to show people pulling out suitcases full of ballots, which Dominion systems would have trouble distinguishing for these reasons according to expert Z."
I don't know what American Thinker said about it, so I don't know which case they're in. But they may well reason that they're getting off cheaply by just running the statement, since the election is now well and truly settled as a practical matter. Even if they were responsible journalists and felt they could prove it eventually in court, they'll save a bunch of money if Dominion is satisfied with this. It's just electrons; they don't even have to pay to print it like the newspapers used to do. (And I also don't know what kind of resources they have; Dominion is quite wealthy and can afford lawyers on retainer for as long as necessary, which our blogs certainly couldn't do. AT is probably somewhere in between us and Dominion, and I'd wager much closer to us than them.)
Ah, thanks, Grim, for recognizing that. (I just got back here and saw Avi's query of my comment.) Yes. that is exactly what I was responding to. Sorry I wasn't more clear 'bout that.
I was familiar with the "sue and settle" description, but was unaware of the phrase, "collusive litigation." And, once the electorate had relied on the, shall we say, election flexibility that the change extended to them, who is then going to presume to invalidate their votes (and thereby punish the innocent for the sins of their masters?)
That consent decree a/k/a settlement agreement was quite a clever bit of chicanery.
Here's an analogy which I think is useful. If you are CEO or CFO of a publicly-traded company, then you are now (since Sarbanes-Oxley) required to *personally* certify your company's financial results.
If the company were a large, complex, and geographically-distributed one...and the compilation and consolidation of those results had been done in a manner analogous to the recent election (lots of last-minute changes, many allegations by observers of fraud, questions about whether the relevant laws and regulations had been properly applied)...would you sign the certifications, or would you suffer the embarrassment, PR hit, and SEC unhappiness resulting from a delay?
Grim: No legislature changed that law
The U.S. Congress changed that law. Federal law has priority over federal elections.
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