Reply #99: Bev, do you realize what you've said?

[demobabe]

You're criticizing and giving legal advice to two of our country's top LAWYERS with YEARS of legal experience?

If they have indeed given up, they've most likely made the decision to use the money to further the cause of the Democratic party rather than to flush it down the drain on battles they know they can't win. As the system stands now, we ALREADY know our votes can be corrupted, elections stolen - we saw it in 2000 and 2002 - there is no reason to believe 2004 would be any different. Going up against Republican stacked courts would not only be futile (as perhaps you're beginning to see with the Volusia suit) but could further damage the Democratic party. I'm not ready to jump to the conclusion they're being irresponsible with the legal war chest.

It would have been more helpful if you'd filed your lawsuit by the deadline (you had all your evidence on Friday preceding the Monday deadline) - or at least filed some complaint - any complaint - and then amended it later when you had the details.

But as I've said in other threads, the evidence you have is pretty weak overall legally - I thought your best hope was the poll tapes in which you found discrepancies between the results provided to you in the FOIA and the tapes you found in the trash. I was surprised you didn't show that evidence to CNN - but another article reported the differences wouldn't affect the outcome of the election and wouldn't be enough to get any real results in court.

The screenshot from the trash - I don't see how that could possibly be authenticated, and therefore would be considered hearsay and not admitted unless you witnessed the printing of the screenshot or could subpeona the person who made the screenshot to testify. And unless you have proof of
the GEMS server actually being contacted and connected to, that's not evidence of fraud - and even if the county official lied about the network status of that machine, it probably would not be considered material (once again, no proof of fraud or manipulation - even though we would think it should be).

The missing information isn't a smoking gun, either. It's just missing information. You can't legally jump to conclusions that because information is missing, that there is automatically a problem. Of course CNN isn't going to report on that - it's not a story! The news generally doesn't cover things like "there MAY BE vote fraud because not all public records are released." The story they're looking for is "There IS vote fraud because we can compare these specific pieces of evidence against each other and it shows clear corruption in the vote."

The courts in the South aren't particularly friendly towards outsiders, and most are Republican packed. This is why I believe Kerry/Edwards are not going for a recount. They may be doing something else behind the scenes; taking a different route - but as lawyers, they know how to pick their battles.

There are two problems that need to be addressed:
1) corruption of the courts
2) more reliable audit systems with the voting machines

As long as Republican judges head up the courts, we'll keep getting slaughtered in them, and unless there is a true way to recount votes (including the DREs), you're not going to necessarily get reliable information using the FOIA. But it's a chicken/egg thing here: the machines have to be reliable to elect new judges, and the judges have to be reliable to fix the current issues with the machines...

Doing the seminars at this point to teach people how to do your audits is mostly going to yield more of the same: very little. Big changes need to happen on a higher level - but given the current political climate, that's a tall order.