Stolen?

If I were to be scrupulously fair, I would say that the evidence is not sufficient to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the 2020 presidential election was outright stolen. But there is more than enough evidence of election illegalities to call it fraudulent on the balance of probabilities.

And the US Supreme Court agrees.

• The SCOTUS ruled that swing states had illegally counted invalid ballots and that this likely swung the result from Trump to Biden, but ruled 4 to 3 that this illegal act didn't matter and should not be investigated. (By the way, both of Trump's appointees agreed with the majority view -- I guess the Democrats were correct when they said that neither Kavanaugh nor Barrett were qualified to be Supreme Court justices.)

• The three dissenting judges wrote dissents.

So there you have it: straight from the SCOTUS, the 2020 election was probably decided by illegal votes, but that's absolutely fine. American democracy in action. When the Supreme Court stole the election for Dubyah Bush in 2000, the mainstream press screamed about it for weeks. Now, not a peep.

There's an imperial ton (that's bigger than a metric ton) of evidence suggesting fraud, but with the refusal of the justice department or any neutral electoral commission to investigate, the case for fraud remains unproven to the standard required by the law.

The thing to remember about the American electoral system is that there are no reliable systems to ensure or verify vote-counting, and bipartisan laws make it almost impossible to prove electoral fraud, even in the most blatant cases. Sure, they prosecute a few petty cheats for voting three times, but that's about all. Counties are supposed to hold ballots for recount, but they routinely, and illegally, destroy ballots immediately after the election, making verification impossible.

Fox paid $787.5m to dominion voting systems

Dominion has been awarded $787 million. Whether Fox actually pays it or not remains to be seen. But Fox's revenue for the 12 months ending March of this year was just under $15 billion, they can afford it. To Rupert Murdoch, this is just a cost of doing business.

Why did they do that instead of showing in court that they believed the election was stolen, or at least were reporting lies but without actual malice?

Why indeed?

Fox is controlled opposition. They don't want to see Trump win any more than the Never Trump Republicans or Democrats do. But they do want to establish a terrible precedent that the establishment can weaponise against indy media.

There's a shit-ton of evidence that Dominion machines could have been hacked or manipulated, including actual forensic evidence of vote manipulation in Michigan. The one time a court allowed an independent auditor to look at a Dominion voting machine, which the county fought tooth and nail to prevent, the audit found a ton of evidence that the machine's error rate of 68% was far above legally permitted levels.

The audit also found that the machine had been improperly manipulated and data deleted, with missing security logs and evidence of tampering.

We know, without even a shadow of a doubt, that electronic voting machines can be hacked. It is widely known in the IT Security sector just how insecure electronic voting is, and until Dominion started throwing lawsuits around, the media used to report on the use of secret, unaudited software that can easily and undetectably modify votes and suffer from proven security vulnerabilities.

The security flaws in voting machines were reported right up to the 2020 election, and then Dominion started suing media outlets and "setting the record straight" about how amazingly awesomely secure their voting machines are. The two biggest voting machine companies don't even pretend to be neutral: Premier (formally known as Diebold) is closely tied to the Republicans; the CEO of Diebold once infamously promised in public to "deliver" Ohio to the Republicans. Dominion was started by Democrats, who remain share holders in the company.

US elections have been vulnerable for a long time. The chain of custody of voting machines is often broken, with election officials unable to account for machines. Voting systems are frequently broken into. A year ago, CISA reported on a bunch of software vulnerabilities in Dominion systems.