Do you agree or disagree with Twitters decision to suspend Trump for tweeting
- Thread starter Mr_X
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hanimmal
Well-Known Member
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/01/swing-state-counties-that-used-dominion-voting-machines-mostly-voted-trump/
Voting machines provided to counties by Dominion Voting Systems allowed a national conspiracy involving both Democrats and Republicans to flip votes cast for President Trump to ones for President-elect Joe Biden. This was simply a repeat of what happened in Venezuela a few years ago, where the same system was in place. As a result, Biden was fraudulently elected president.
There are a lot of reasons that the preceding paragraph is nonsense. One is that the system implicated in the Venezuelan election isn’t actually linked to Dominion in any meaningful way. Another is the idea that Republican officials such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) somehow ensured a victory for Biden is ludicrous on its face. The third is that there’s literally no evidence that any such changes were made. The claims start from the assumption that Biden couldn’t have gotten the support that he did and use that as a starting point for assuming malfeasance.
But upon digging even slightly deeper into the conspiracy theory — a theory that’s been touted not only by former Trump attorney Sidney Powell but by the president himself — the idea that Dominion systems were used to throw the election quickly breaks down.
It’s important to recognize how elections in the United States are run. It is neither the federal nor state government which administers an election; instead, elections are run by counties. In most states, counties determine their own systems for doing so, including what electronic voting machines they’ll use. So it may be the case that Alpha County uses Dominion machines while next-door Beta County doesn’t, meaning that those criminals seeking to use Dominion’s tools to throw a statewide race have to make do with tweaking things in Alpha and not Beta.
A review of 10 key states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) finds that Dominion systems were used in 351 of 731 counties. Trump won 283 of those counties, 81 percent of the total. He won 79 percent of the counties that didn’t use Dominion systems.
In counties that used Dominion systems, Biden got 888,259 votes to Trump’s 851,069. In counties that didn’t use Dominion systems, Biden got 1.54 million votes to Trump’s 1.52 million. In other words, if you eliminated every county that used Dominion systems, Biden still got more votes. Biden won Dominion-using counties by about two points overall compared with his 0.5-point margin in non-Dominion counties.
Four years ago, Trump won more votes in both sets of counties. In most counties, though, the top-line result didn’t change: if Trump won in 2016, he won in 2020, and if he lost then, he lost last month, too.
In 19 counties, though, the result flipped from four years ago. Trump picked up one county and Biden won 18. Of those 18, seven of Biden’s pickups came in counties that used Dominion systems. Eleven came in counties that didn’t. Trump’s sole pickup was in a state that flipped from red to blue, Georgia. That county, Burke, used Dominion systems.
The average shift in the margin between the two major-party candidates from 2016 to 2020 in counties that used Dominion systems was a four-point shift to Biden. In counties that didn’t use those systems, the average shift was three points to Biden. The average increase in votes for Biden relative to Hillary Clinton was 29 percent in Dominion-using counties and 27 percent in non-Dominion counties. The average increase in votes for Trump from 2016 to 2020 was 19 percent in both types of county.
The idea that Trump only lost, say, Pennsylvania, because of Dominion voting systems has to reconcile with the fact that Trump actually won more votes in counties that used Dominion systems (beating Biden by about 74,000 votes in those counties) but lost the state because he was beaten by 154,000 votes in non-Dominion counties. That same pattern holds in Wisconsin as well.
In other words, there’s nothing to suggest that counties using Dominion systems looked significantly different from counties that didn’t. The idea that Biden is president-elect because of some nefarious calculations simply doesn’t match the reality of the county-level vote results.
But, then, we’re trying to combat a bizarre conspiracy theory with small doses of reality, a medicine that has repeatedly proved ineffective.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
The nice thing is that with this lawsuit, Trump's lawyers gets a shot to prove their case once again. Powell will get to have discovery into Dominion because of this lawsuit, so she got what she asked for.
link to story
Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit against lawyer Sidney Powell, demanding more than $1.3 billion in damages for havoc it says Powell has caused by spreading “wild” and “demonstrably false” allegations, including that Dominion played a central role in a fantastical scheme to steal the 2020 election from President Trump.
For weeks, Powell has claimed that Dominion was established with communist money in Venezuela to enable ballot-stuffing and other vote manipulation, and that those abilities were harnessed to rig the election for former vice president Joe Biden.
In a 124-page complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Dominion said its reputation and resale value have been deeply damaged by a “viral disinformation campaign” that Powell mounted “to financially enrich herself, to raise her public profile, and to ingratiate herself to Donald Trump.”
The defendants named in the lawsuit include Powell, her law firm and Defending the Republic, the organization she set up to solicit donations to support her election-related litigation.
Read the full complaint here
In an interview, Dominion CEO John Poulos said the lawsuit aims to clear his company’s name through a full airing of the facts about the 2020 election.
Poulos said he would like the case to go to trial rather than settle.
“We feel that it’s important for the entire electoral process,” he said. “The allegations, I know they were lobbed against us . . . but the impacts go so far beyond us.”
Powell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For Trump advocate Sidney Powell, a playbook steeped in conspiracy theories
Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence
She has claimed that Dominion’s voting system was created in Venezuela to rig elections for former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and has said that secret algorithms in Dominion machines were used to manipulate votes in favor of Biden in 2020. She has accused the company of bribing Georgia officials to win a no-bid contract with the state. She has promised to tweet a video of Dominion’s founder — Poulos — saying he could “change a million votes, no problem at all.”
No such video ever materialized.
Dominion’s lawsuit cites “mountains of evidence conclusively disproving Powell’s vote-manipulation claims.” While many pages of the complaint are devoted to dissecting and rebutting of those claims, the company notes in particular that hand counts — including a statewide hand count of millions of ballots in Georgia — have confirmed that Dominion machines tabulated votes accurately.
Dominion sent Powell a letter on Dec. 16 demanding that she retract her “wild, knowingly baseless, and false accusations.” Four days later, Powell wrote on Twitter that she was “retracting nothing.”
“We have #evidence,” she wrote. “They are #fraud masters!”
Since then, Powell has continued accusing Dominion of wrongdoing, including in a Jan. 3 tweet claiming that thousands of votes in Georgia were switched from Trump to Biden.
The complaint filed Friday accuses Powell of breaking state defamation laws in Georgia, where she spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in December, and in the District of Columbia, where she appeared at a November news conference and has given multiple interviews from the Trump International Hotel. It also alleges that she engaged in deceptive trade practices by using false statements about Dominion to raise her public profile, gain clients and sell more copies of a book she wrote in 2014.
The lawsuit, which seeks both compensatory and punitive damages, is based on Powell’s statements to the public and the media rather than on the allegations she made in federal lawsuits she filed seeking to overturn election results in four battleground states. But Powell’s actions in those cases — popularly known as the “kraken” suits, after a mythological sea-creature that Powell has adopted as a mascot — are under separate legal scrutiny.
On Tuesday, the city of Detroit asked a federal judge in Michigan to punish Powell and her team of lawyers, including Wood, for using the courts to put forth “false and frivolous claims while seeking relief with massive implications for our democracy.”
Powell’s lawsuit in Michigan was “full of intentional lies” and baseless accusations, and the Dominion-
related conspiracy theory was “perhaps the most baseless,” Detroit’s lawyers wrote in a 56-page motion for sanctions.
They asked Judge Linda V. Parker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to refer Powell and her team of lawyers to the court’s chief judge for disbarment, and to refer them for further professional discipline to authorities in their home states — Texas, in Powell’s case.
Detroit also asked the judge to levy a financial penalty “sufficient to deter future misconduct,” at least equal to the amount of money that Powell and her team have raised to fund their post-election lawsuits.
Wood said Friday that he had not seen Detroit’s motion but believed it was politically motivated. “On the face of it, I’d call it nonsense,” he said.
Parker, who will decide how to handle the request, is the same judge who heard Powell’s kraken lawsuit in December. She dismissed it, finding that the allegations were “nothing but speculation and conjecture.”
Powell has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr_X
Well-Known Member
reasons twitter suspended him. agree or disagree? i agree because i support law and order.
