uh... we have binders full of affidavits from people who saw stuff.
I thought you've been saying this whole time that none of that counts, not that "nobody saw anything".
Binders full of affidavits that the courts have examined and said don't actually evidence what the Trump campaign and its supporters claim.
To use one of your favorite examples, let's look at Melissa Carone, whom you have taken to calling "lawful good". To quote Judge Timothy Kenny who
reviewed the affidavit of her and others that Trump et al continue to cite: "Ms. Carone's description of events at the TCF Center does not square with any of the other affiants. There are no other reports of lost data, or of tabulation machines that jammed repeatedly every hour during the count. Neither Republican nor Democrat challengers nor city officials substantiate her version of events. The allegations simply are not credible." Moreover, we notice a certain tendency in her comments for 'fish stories' in that the claims grow with the retelling. What started off as claiming that some ballots were scanned multiple times grew to batches of hundreds of ballots being scanned more than half a dozen times, which grew to 30,000 votes being counted multiple times and not reflected in the poll books, and when called out on the fact that the poll book did not, in fact, have a deficit of 30,000+ votes, she tripled down on it and claimed it was off by more than a hundred thousand, that there were "zero registered voters" in Wayne County, that turnout there had been 120% (In actuality, Wayne County turnout was about 62%, with roughly 878,100 votes cast), and that the books must have been doctored...to say nothing of her claim that "every single thing" that happened in the TCF Center was fraud.
And mind you, it's not just Carone's affidavit that the courts have found fault with. Speaking more generally of the affidavits that the Trump campaign put to the court, Judge Kenny noted that the affiants were misinterpreting standard practice as malicious anomalies due to their failure to acquaint themselves with the process. As he mused, "Perhaps if Plaintiffs election challenger affiants had attended the October 29, 2020 walk-through of the TCF Center ballot-counting location, questions and concerns could have been answered in advance of Election Day. Regrettably, they did not and, therefore, Plaintiffs' affiants did not have a full understanding of the TCF absentee ballot tabulation process. No formal challenges were filed. However, sinister, fraudulent motives were ascribed to the process and the City of Detroit. Plaintiffs' interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible." This is very much a recurring theme among all the affidavits the Trump campaign is peddling; they're claims based on
assumption and ignorance. When actually scrutinized - as must be done with any testimony - they consistently fall flat and don't satisfy the evidential burden. To put it simply, they not only are insufficient evidence to build a case on, they're insufficient evidence for even probable cause.
You appear to be laboring under a series of delusions related to affidavits, not the least of which is that by their very nature the affidavits constitute strong evidence that would prove your case if only the courts would hear them - because otherwise the affiants would have perjured themselves - and therefore the only reason that the courts haven't ruled in your favor is that they must have been prevented from seeing those testimonies. And every part of that thought is wrong. To start with, affidavits are not the be-all end-all of evidence, and they don't have to be perjurious to be wrong, paint a false picture of events, or otherwise not be credible. A dozen people can attest that a given event happened in different, mutually exclusive ways without any of them committing perjury. Affidavits are not statements of proven fact, they're testimony of the speaker's perception,. By the same token, perjury is not simply an untrue statement, but a
deliberately false one. In order to prove perjury one must first prove that the misstatement of fact was both material and
willful, and the latter is especially difficult to prove given the malleability of memory.
Which brings us back to the point at hand; even at the best of times affidavits aren't particularly strong evidence, for exactly the same reason that eyewitness testimony isn't. For starters, they're necessarily limited by the speaker's limited perception and selective attention to detail, to say nothing of how both are warped by preconception (and in this case many of the affiants pre-election activity show that they'd already assumed fraud to be a given before the process even started, making them exceptionally prone to both false positives and confirmation bias) and the degree to which they understand (or in this case fail to understand) what they were seeing. Moreover, both memory and perception are subject to being warped by emotion, stress, post-hoc rationalization, and - in the case of memory - simple decay over time to name but a few influences. Something as simple as priming or a leading question can alter how we perceive and recall an event. And I would reemphasize here that Trump had been doing such priming for
months before the election.
Additionally, it is not that the courts haven't seen these affidavits, quite the contrary, in fact. They've seen them, vetted them, and found that they aren't credible for reasons varying from the affiants' demonstrable ignorance to conflicting testimony. Never mind that the lion's share of those affidavits are firmly speculation or hearsay (sometimes both) and have no evidentiary basis. This is to say that the courts have found the affidavits to be speculating misconduct which they infer from circumstantial evidence that actually has legitimate explanations (eg, the apparent lack of verification being attributable to the fact that the verification process took place at Detroit Election Headquarters before the ballots were sent to be counted at the TCF Center) that they simply had not bothered to learn about. That does not make the affiants perjurious, but it does mean that they lack both the credibility and competency on which such testimony must always be judged. It is not that the courts have not seen what the Trump campaign is touting as evidence, it is that the evidence doesn't even hold up to preliminary scrutiny, that they aren't just unsupported but often demonstrably factually wrong.
However, dishonest individuals have continued to tout those same weak and debunked claims as if they were ironclad evidence in an attempt to sway public opinion. For an audience that rarely looks much deeper than tweets or headlines and almost never does the legwork for independent verification, their take will generally end at "they testified that...", not that the testimony was found not to be credible. Indeed, if they had come in convinced of the former take, there's a strong possibility that they'd double down on it, up to and including claiming that the people contesting their prejudice were either complicit or even co-conspirators.
In case that isn't clear, that is
exactly what we're seeing now with Trump's base in general and you yourself in this thread. To be blunt, Trump told you
exactly what you wanted to hear when he said that fraud was the only way he could lose. "Heads I win, tails they cheated",
like he always claims. You've been scrambling to find any excuse - no matter how flimsy - to believe that ever since. Time and again the courts have reviewed the claims of Trump and his allies and explained that they do not hold up to scrutiny. That they are "strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence", that in every case "the claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent". Time and again, judges and justices - including those installed by Trump himself - have stated that Trump et al are bullshitting and that the case has no foundation, that "Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here". Time and again Federal Agencies - including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Justice and its Election Crimes Branch have said that there is no evidence of the level of fraud Trump et al allege.
And that's not enough for you. It's
never going to be enough for you. You've made it quite clear that for all you like to pretty it up as being about legality, that's little more than a pretense for a desperate hope that there's still a way for your 'team' to win. You jump at and devour every bit of speculation, allegation, and political theater from Trump et al as something that will overturn the results. But when the courts say it doesn't hold up, you dismiss it and infer that since it didn't match your prejudices they clearly couldn't
really have looked into the claims, even with Trump appointees. Ironically, this is usually demonstrably attributable to you not caring enough about the facts of the matter to even read the court's ruling or doing your due diligence on the claims of your sources.
