Dominion Voting Systems sues pro-Trump lawyer, seeking more than $1.3B

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dominion-sues-pro-trump-lawyer-sidney-powell-seeking-more-than-13-billion/2021/01/08/ebe5dbe0-5106-11eb-b96e-0e54447b23a1_story.html

by sahin • 6 years ago

59 105 6 years ago

washingtonpost.com

CurtHagenlocher• 6 years ago

A direct link to the court filing: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.225699/...

Reading it was entertaining.

auslegung2• 6 years ago

That’s good stuff. Now if only consequences would come about for everyone else involved in the attempt to overthrow our democracy.

openasocket• 6 years ago

Lot of links to various crazy media outlets and tweets in there citing Sidney Powell and pushing conspiracy theories. I mostly skimmed, but I think my "favorite" was a tweet that said "Dominion comes from Venezuela and Venezuela is like a Swedish colony. What Sweden or rather what someone controls..." I really don't know what to make of that

mywittyname5• 6 years ago

Poulos said he would like the case to go to trial rather than settle.

Damn straight.

As an aside, I wish settlements were public record.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

In this case, I'd assume the whole point is to go to trial. They're not actually going to recover anything like their real damages from the lawyer, so their best avenue is to very publicly demonstrate that they were lied about.

jessaustin5• 6 years ago

On one side, a grifter taking cynical advantage of baseless, war-media-stoked fears of Venezuela in addition to numerous other baseless and racist conspiracy theories. On the other side, a secretive foreign firm that makes millions foisting unaudited closed-source voting machines on clueless municipalities.

Frankly, I hope they both lose.

auslegung2• 6 years ago

Secretive foreign firm? Aren’t they Canadian? Not that Canada isn’t foreign but it’s basically impossible to read what you wrote without a hateful, distrusting tone that assumes non Americans are bad. And how are they secretive in any way that’s relevant to their ability to build and maintain verifiable machines?

jaywalk2• 6 years ago

There are many aspects of government that non-Americans are prohibited from participating in. It has nothing to do with all non-Americans being bad and all Americans being good, but it's a decent first-level screening method. Kind of like requiring a college degree in a job listing.

jariel4• 6 years ago

They were founded in Toronto but they are American.

The notion that there's any degree of shadiness about them is completely unwarranted. The company and tech are perfectly legit.

If there are any 'issues' at all with the election, it's more rooted in the fact that the US can't very easily identify people, doesn't know who is dead, who is alive, and who are actual residents.

If you dig into the 'voter roll purging' issue in Georgia, it reveals that much of the problems derive from the grey areas there.

That said, the elections are clean and fair, these ambiguities don't provide necessary for widespread fraud.

jessaustin5• 6 years ago

I like Canadians and I like Canada. I am hateful and distrusting of closed-source voting machines. Perhaps it was wrong to appeal to the tired old "let's have ruinous economic sanctions on most foreign nations" prejudice that so many public officials pretend to have... At some level it would be nice if the people administering elections in a particular jurisdiction were subject to the laws of that jurisdiction.

Voting machines are inherently a challenge to verify. Even if the voter herself compiles source code and loads the resulting object into the machine before voting, it's impossible for her to verify the hardware is actually using that object. The paper ballots produced by these machines have marks next to candidates, but they also have an opaque bar code and that's what gets scanned when votes are "recounted". On top of all this, considering the design and code of these machines to be commercial secrets ensures error and distrust.

bryanlarsen2• 6 years ago

They're an American company (Premier) spun out of an American company (Diebold) that was bought by an American competitor (ES&S) that was then spun out of ES&S due to anti-trust concerns and bought by a Canadian company (Dominion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_Election_Solutions

hedora2• 6 years ago

People should distrust foreign interference in elections. It’s supposedly illegal in the US.

Historically, “interference” has broadly included things like providing financial support to candidates, running news stories about candidates (or running news stations in the US, at all), and so on.

The lifting of these restrictions led directly to Fox News (which is an Australian company), which has long been a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. All of this happens despite the fact that it would be illegal for the Republican Party to take campaign donations from Australians.

We need to reinstate media ownership laws in the US.

guscost2• 6 years ago

The only player coming out of this looking good seems to be Texas, which said "no thanks" to their sales pitch (after a security audit) and avoided the whole mess.

jessaustin5• 6 years ago

I wanted to think well of Texas, but then I found they are one of four states (out of fifty!) who don't have paper trails for all machines used in the state.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voting...

mistermann7• 6 years ago

I think it is worth noting that late night comedians (John Oliver, etc) had an absolute field day with the voting machine fraud meme after the 2006 election.

I think it's really interesting how you can completely flip people's reaction to a scenario by flipping one variable, and the people perceive themselves to be perfectly logical. The human mind is such a mystery.

bryanlarsen2• 6 years ago

The main complaint in 2006 was that there was no auditable paper trail. The 2020 machines all had an auditable paper trail.

Is it surprising that people switch their viewpoint after their major concern was satisfied?

inscionent• 6 years ago

John Oliver was only hired on the daily show in July 2006. 2006 was a year full of evidence and disclosures of voting machine security issues. Do you have a bias?

I think it's really interesting how you can completely flip people's reaction to a scenario by flipping one variable, and the people perceive themselves to be perfectly logical. The human mind is such a mystery.

mistermann7• 6 years ago

Why does this comment (the one to which I am replying) have a score of "0" instead of "-1"?

Is this a glitch in the matrix? A bug in the code?

spamizbad• 6 years ago

Lawsuit is fully justified. Their reputation was (needlessly) destroyed. I don't think you could ever get a Dominion machine approved in the current political climate for the foreseeable future. They'll likely need a rebrand to survive.

dariusj18• 6 years ago

This is exactly why defamation is a thing. If this doesn't end up with a ruling for Dominion, I'm not sure who has a case.

VikingCoder22• 6 years ago

I'm really struggling to have empathy with people who blame Dominion for changing votes in the 2020 General Election.

There was a hand recount in Georgia, was there not? And the numbers agreed with what had been counted by Dominion?

If you accept that the hand recount matched (within a reasonable margin of error) the count from the Dominion machines, what exactly is the rest of their objection or concern?

Honestly, can someone explain this to me?

xnx• 6 years ago

The simplest explanation is the right one. The losing party does not accept their loss and will promote any idea that can invalidate the outcome. The judgement of dozens of court cases has been that none of these ideas have any merit.

OJFord2• 6 years ago

The simplest explanation is the right one. [...]

Occam's actual razor is that the simplest explanation of competing theories is most likely the right one.

deathlight• 6 years ago

The story I heard is that most of these lawsuits are not being judged as BS on the merits (though some have). The majority are being thrown out using a variety of legal doctrines such as laches or standing. This is not necessarily unusual as court proceedings go, but the unfortunate side effect of doing this is that the ardent faithful will now have a lost-cause narrative to fall back on when everything else has been mowed clear.

I would prefer more of these cases to actually be tried so that they can be obliterated on the merits. Each case that is thrown out on a technicality is another tiny lilypad to stand on, and each case that is actually refuted is the removal of that pad.

mistermann7• 6 years ago

For Georgia, provided all the totals were a perfect match between initially published machine counts and hand counts, and the hand count methodology was transparent and trustworthy, this is enough to satisfy me. The only other attack vector I can think of would be smuggling in pre-filled ballots, and that's likely unfalsifiable with current election procedures (which I'd like to see improved, but until then we have to live with it).

As for why things haven't settled overall, maybe other states don't follow the same procedures as Georgia. Did all disputed states perform hand counts?

VikingCoder22• 6 years ago

Georgia has a poll book. Do you know what a poll book is, and how it works? When a ballot is received, the name of the person is entered into a poll book. Therefore, when you see a poll book and a pile of ballots, you can check that the counts are the same. Entering data into the poll book is therefore one of the most critical parts of an election, and is the part that is critically observed by election watchers.

You cannot merely smuggle in pre-filled ballots, as the ballot counts would not match the poll book counts.

You would also need to explain how poll books were falsely updated.

If someone smuggled in fake ballots, AND somehow managed to falsify the poll book, it would be possible to use the poll book to ASK people if they voted. You could then find people who say they did not vote, but there is a record of them voting.

It is therefore trivially falsifiable with current election procedures.

Or is there something you think I'm missing?

Here is the critical moment where the woman in Michigan argues with a Republican, claiming without evidence that the poll book is off, when it was literally trivial to check it. (Look for the tweet with "Holy smokes the sequel is even better!")

https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1334311448340795396

jariel4• 6 years ago

You're missing the issue - this is not about the legitimacy of any particular system, it's just about lies and misinformation.

The claims of widespread election fraud have no material basis, it's entirely an issue of political theatre.

If you just lie, lie, lie on Twitter, FB, wherever ... then a certain number of people will believe it's true.

Especially if segments of the press back you.

So the normative rules of 'spin and narrative creation' which politicians and the press are all guilty of, has been escalated to 'total fabrication of facts'.

There's no real foundation in real facts, which makes any of these issues impossible to navigate from that perspective.

No amount of fidelity, auditing or recounts will placate a group who's objective is to reject whatever reality doesn't suit them. 'Evidence' is pointless if someone can reject it out of hand.

Consider how important 'integrity' is, in all of our systems, and how badly it falls apart when we stop doing our jobs with integrity. That includes us.

mywittyname5• 6 years ago

which politicians and the press are all guilty of,

This attitude is a contributing factor. It is letting people off the hook for regurgitating fabricated stories, by giving the impression that nobody is telling the truth anyway.

There are several politicians and media outlets who are truthful and backing their claims with evidence (and retracting statements found to be untrue). But since some other people are liars, apparently everyone is a liar. So you might as well believe what you want.

rsynnott2• 6 years ago

The aim of this isn't to raise legitimate concerns, it's to produce distrust. Lots of people will have heard about Dominion via dodgy Facebook news or endlessly-forwarded stuff on WhatsApp or whatever; fewer will have read about, or understood, the recounts.

disgrunt18• 6 years ago

Nothing establishes trust like accusing those of making such claims, legitimate or not, of sedition.

notafraudster2• 6 years ago

I mean, your thoughts are a rational way of thinking about this. Rationally, you might think that if you are concerned about a vote tally machine, you could do a hand recount, and if it matched, then clearly the proposed fraud couldn't be taking place at the vote tally level. That's a very normal way of thinking through things. And I don't actually blame anyone who has concerns about election security or vote tallying, it's a natural and important thing to worry about.

But let me suggest this: The modal person who has "concerns" about the election right now is a Republican who was told by the Republican president and Republican senators and congressmen that evil Democrats stole the election and that's why they won. It is mostly about retroactive justification of a feeling like Republicans -- or Trump, in specific -- should have won but didn't. This comes after a year long campaign of saying the news was fake, the polling was fake, Joe Biden is low energy, Hunter Biden did something horrible, 90% of OANN respondents say Trump won the debate, etc etc etc.

And here I'm talking about reasonable, regular Republicans out there in the world. The modal person you hear yelling ONLINE about this stuff literally believes that the Democratic Party is an international child sex and murder ring run by Hillary Clinton and Barry Soetero (a Muslim Atheist who was born in Kenya) who gain superpowers by chemically extracting hormones from the dead kids they murder in the basement of a pizza place in DC.

The legal partner of the lawyer being sued here believes that the vice president should be executed for refusing to overturn the election, that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is a pedophile and a child murderer, and that Jeffrey Epstein is still alive. The lady who got shot to death the other day is an avid follower and retweeter of this person: she died for the cause she loved, foolishly believing internet grifters who claim everything is a communist plot. The Viking guy who stormed the house floor believes he is a spiritual interpreter for a movement that says JFK Jr. is secretly alive and a middle-aged dude in a bowler hat who teamed up with Trump to execute all the Democrats who killed his father. I wish I was joking, all of this accurately reflects what we're talking about here. These are the people whose position we're trying to understand.

They don't think Dominion is an election company that changed some votes or whatever, they think Dominion is a communist front run by Cuba and China and the dead former president of Venezuela and Canada (which is just China, they both start with "C", suspicious???) and Hunter Biden. Dominion's entire reason for existing is electing communists like Joe Biden. They believe that not a single Democrat won anywhere in the country, that majority-black areas of the south and majority-Latino areas of LA that vote 85% Democratic are actually Trump strongholds if not for the fraud. Don't pay any mind for why they didn't sue in the other 43 states or why they didn't try to overturn any house elections.

This is like understanding why John Hinckley shot Reagan. Literally, he did it because he believed Jodie Foster was sending him psychic messages that she wanted to be with him if only he'd make a grand gesture. But I don't think we can do much if our objective is to try to convince him that he was wrong about that, because he wasn't engaging in a rational analysis of the evidence to begin with.

disgrunt18• 6 years ago

Your frothing at the mouth hyperbole aside... I'm not a Republican, I'm not even an American, and I see a lot of issues with how this election was conducted. Maybe you don't, or don't want to. Maybe the end justifies the means. But when the shoe is on the other foot, remember this garbage you just posted to HN before you start crying foul.

If I was an American I'd want to be confident in the election process. I don't know how one remains confident with videos of election observers being removed from counting areas to rousing applause, videos of counting areas being blocked off from observers using cardboard and other opaque barriers, video of ballots being counted after election observers had gone home for the night, hundreds of witnesses reporting irregularities, etc.

The country I'm from isn't perfect when it comes to elections, either. But given its immense power in the world, I'm greatly concerned with what I've observed in the United States.

disgrunt18• 6 years ago

The Dominion claim isn't the only one in Georgia. In fact, most of the lawsuits, two of which are ongoing, are regarding the changes the Georgia Secretary of State made in March 2020 to relax signature matching and ballot curing rules for absentee ballots. Since the Secretary of State is not a part of the legislature, this relaxation is alleged to be unconstitutional.

You can find a breakdown of the lawsuits here. [0]

There was a hand recount in Georgia. But if the dispute is over the ballots themselves and their veracity, then a recount does little to resolve it. The Georgia Governor has since called for a signature audit, but limited it to Cobb county. Most of the witness affidavits regarding signatures not being verified came out of Fulton county.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...

Mirioron• 6 years ago

I still don't understand. How does this place the blame on Dominion? It seems like they did their thing right.

Fjolsvith• 6 years ago

Point to a single court case in the US regarding this election year where evidence was presented in court and judged.

Every single case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

Edit: At least with this lawsuit we will finally see some evidence.

VikingCoder22• 6 years ago

Every single case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

So, the procedures should have been followed.

This is such a simple thing to say, and easy to understand. Except you seem to not accept that. Why not?

And the Supreme Court case, they said, even if they'd listened to the case, there would have been no remedy. Meaning, it would have been pointless to listen, but they think by law they should have listened.

This says to me that the people filing these cases do not understand the procedures, do not understand the possible remedies, were not acting in good faith.

Why doesn't it say that to you?

aw16211074• 6 years ago

Point to a single court case in the US regarding this election year where evidence was presented in court and judged.

Kind of depends on what precisely you mean by "presented in court and judged", but the evidence was evaluated by judges and found wanting:

Bowyer v. Ducey, in Arizona [0]:

The various affidavits and expert reports are largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections. Because the Complaint is grounded in these fraud allegations, the Complaint shall be dismissed.
Plaintiffs first “describe specific violations of Arizona law” to support their fraud claims. In doing so, they attach declarations from poll watchers that observed election officials during the November General Election. As Intervenor-Defendant Maricopa County points out, these are the only declarants offered by Plaintiffs with first-hand observation of the election administration. But these four declarants do not allege fraud at all... These objections to the manner in which Arizona officials administered the election cannot serve to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona because they fail to present evidence that supports the underlying fraud claim.
The sheer unreliability of the information underlying Mr. Briggs’ “analysis” of Mr. Braynard’s “data” cannot plausibly serve as a basis to overturn a presidential election, much less support plausible fraud claims against these Defendants.
To lend support to this theory [of voting machines being hacked], Plaintiffs offer expert Russell Ramsland, Jr., who asserts there was “an improbable, and possibly impossible spike in processed votes” in Maricopa and Pima Counties at 8:46 p.m. on November 3, 2020... Thus, the Court finds that while this “spike” could be explained by an illicit hacking of voting machinery in Arizona, the spike is “not only compatible with, but indeed was more likely explained by, lawful, unchoreographed” reporting of early ballot tabulation in those counties.

----

King v. Whitmer, in Michigan [1]:

The Court may deny Plaintiffs’ motion for injunctive relief for the reasons discussed above. Nevertheless, the Court will proceed to analyze the merits of their claims.
Plaintiffs attempt to establish an Equal Protection claim based on the theory that Defendants engaged in “several schemes” to, among other things, “destroy,” “discard,” and “switch” votes for President Trump, thereby “devalu[ing] Republican votes” and “diluting” the influence of their individual votes.
But, to be perfectly clear, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim is not supported by any allegation that Defendants’ alleged schemes caused votes for President Trump to be changed to votes for Vice President Biden.
But of course, “[a] belief [from a sworn affidavit] is not evidence” and falls far short of what is required to obtain any relief, much less the extraordinary relief Plaintiffs request.
With nothing but speculation and conjecture that votes for President Trump were destroyed, discarded or switched to votes for Vice President Biden, Plaintiffs’ equal protection claim fails.

----

Law v. Whitmer, in Nevada [2]:

The Court nonetheless considers the totality of the evidence provided by Contestants in reaching and ruling upon the merits of their claims.
Contestants offered Mr. Baselice to opine on the incidence of illegal voting in the 2020 General Election based on a phone survey of voters.
The Court questions Mr. Baselice's methodology because he was unable to identify the source of the data for his survey and conducted no quality control of the data he received.
Contestants offered Mr. Kamzol to opine that significant illegal voting occurred in Nevada during the 2020 General Election, based on his analysis of various commercially available databases of voters.
The Court questions Mr. Kamzol's methodology because he had little to no information or supervision over the origins of his data, the manner in which it had been matched, and what the rate of false positives would be. Additionally, there was little or no verification of his numbers.
As reflected herein, the Court finds that the expert testimony provided by Contestants was of little to no value. The Court did not exclude consideration of this evidence, which it could have, but gave it very little weight.

----

There's more, but I hope I've made my point: evidence was considered in more than one case, and was found to be insufficient to rule in the plaintiffs' favor.

----

Every single case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

At least based on my reading of the ruling, this is wrong. Law v. Whitmer was dismissed due to the presented evidence being insufficient:

CONCLUSION
The Contestants failed to meet their burden to provide credible and relevant evidence to substantiate any of the grounds set forth in NRS 293.410 to contest the November 3, 2020 General Election

----

[0] https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

[1] https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

[2] https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/...

Edit: Remove unnecessary "emphasis added"

Edit 2: Add section pointing out Law v. Whitmer was not dismissed on procedural grounds

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

Point to a single court case in the US regarding this election year where evidence was presented in court and judged.

Bowyer v. Ducey (while it was also dismissed for a variety of reasons including standing, abstention in the face of overlapping parallel state court claims, mootness, and laches, the analysis in the ruling leading to dismissal for failure to state a claim included a finding that the offered evidence was a combination of unreliable and irrelevant to the claims.)

Plus there are at least four cases that proceeded to trial.

Every single case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

That's both false (not every single election-related case has been dismissed), and beside the point (as, to the extent that “failure to state a claim” is procedural—arguably that and standing are not, really—it often still involves reviewing the proffered evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiff as to whether it could sustain a prima facie case.)

illustriousbear• 6 years ago

On one hand Trump and his team deserve to lose this case.

On the other hand, I hope it doesn’t silence future complaints.

Protecting against defamation is important but it is more important that those who think they have genuine complaints about an election process aren’t scared into silence.

Dominion Voting Systems sues pro-Trump lawyer, seeking more than $1.3B

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