Every single ruling about evidence of fraud was thrown out. And the Kraken lawyers were sanctioned for bringing frivolous lawsuits, which they are appealing.

The Kraken lawyers do seem to be shysters but did you actually read the judge's ruling in the sanction? I have. It doesn't prove what you think it does.

• Page 2 of the sanction says: "To be clear, for the purpose of the pending sanctions motions, the Court is neither being asked to decide nor has it decided whether there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election in the State of Michigan." The sanctions are not about electoral fraud, but about the attorney's professional behaviour.

• In her conclusion, the judge makes it clear that the attorneys wasted the court's time by pressing a case that could not be won: "given the deficiencies in the pleadings, which claim violations of Michigan election law without a thorough understanding of what the law requires...". This is not a claim that the claims of fraud had no merit. This is a claim that the lawyers failed to understand what was required by the law to prove fraud. (To be clear: that's bad for a lawyer. But it doesn't disprove the claims of fraud.)

• The judge states that the attorneys abused the legal system in four ways:

  • by proffering claims not backed by law;
  • proffering claims not backed by evidence;
  • by proffering factual allegations and claims without engaging in the required prefiling inquiry;
  • and dragging out these proceedings even after they acknowledged that it was too late to attain the relief sought.

The last item is critical. This is not a claim about the merits of the case, but that plaintiffs missed their opportunity to challenge the result and it was too late to do anything about it, and therefore they should have withdrawn. The judge is not using these exact words, but essentially she is saying that even if they were right about the election fraud, legally once the Michigan electors certified the result, there is no legal possibility to overturn it. To quote:

“First, Plaintiffs’ counsel unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings in this litigation by failing to dismiss the case when their claims became moot, which plainly occurred upon the vote of Michigan’s electors on December 14, if not earlier.” (Emphasis added.)

This was not just a throw-away comment, it was critical to the sanctions. The judge literally sanctioned the attorneys for making the defendants file a motion to dismiss instead of voluntarily withdrawing it, and repeated her comment almost word for word: "... by failing to voluntarily dismiss this lawsuit on the date Plaintiffs’ counsel acknowledged it would be moot and thereby necessitating the filing of motions to dismiss, Plaintiffs’ attorneys unreasonably and vexatiously multiplied the proceedings."

Democracy in action. Doesn't matter if the elections are fraudulent, once the result is accepted, you're stuck with it. Once the state electors certify the result, it no longer matters what evidence you have and the courts expect you to withdraw the case under penalty of legal sanction.

As far as the evidence goes, the judge deferred entirely to the state case Costantino, which "rejected" the evidence given. Note that the judge does not say that the evidence was disproved, but only that it was "rejected". The Michigan court rejected the Costantino case in just four days, so I doubt that anyone looked deeply into the evidence. There was certainly no official attempt to collect forensic evidence of fraud, or interview witnesses, or question election workers. The evidence was not seen by a jury, there was no cross-examination of witnesses under penalty of perjury.

And then ten days later the court rejected an appeal by Costantino because the question of fraud was now moot as the electors had certified the results.

Do you not see the vicious circle here? The evidence doesn't get investigated by the authorities who have a vested interest in not rocking the boat, and that lack of investigation gets used as justification to reject the evidence out of hand, which means it never gets seen in a court with a jury and cross-examinations, which then gets used as justification for claiming the evidence has no merit. And since the claims of fraud have no merit, that proves that the elections are fair and secure and there's no need to investigate claims of fraud they can just be dismissed out of hand.

Even if it is correct that the Kraken lawyers used fake "evidence" (in which case I agree they should be sanctioned!) that tells us nothing about the hundreds of other claims from all over the country.

To be clear: I'm not naive. I realise that the majority of fraud claims made in the heat of days and weeks after the 2020 election are probably bogus. Many of them, even if true, may not have shifted the result. But without a proper investigation by authorities, the best anyone can do is collect evidence which suggests fraud, but if the authorities refuse to investigate you cannot prove it to any legal standard. Which is the point -- the only people who are capable of proving fraud to the high standard required to overturn an election refused to investigate, and then used that failure to dismiss the fraud claims with "there's no evidence".

Hundreds of witnesses are prepared to swear in a court of law, under penalty of perjury, that they witnessed fraud. Not one single one of them has actually been asked to do so.

Without a proper investigation by law enforcement and election officials, whatever evidence you can gather will be rejected as "conjecture and supposition" regardless of its merits, and then after being rejected you have no opportunity to defend the evidence and prove it in a court of law.

E.g. videos of election workers unloading ballot boxes at 3am at polling centers when they're supposed to be closed for the night get dismissed as "conjecture" because nobody saw what was inside the boxes (maybe they were filled with kittens) or whether the supposed ballots were actually counted (maybe the workers used them as toilet paper) or indeed whether the ballots were fraudulent or not. The videos don't prove that they were fraudulent so the assumption is that they are not.

Statistical anomalies like thousands of ballots in a row going to one candidate, or results flipping from one candidate to the other overnight when there shouldn't be any vote counting going on, get dismissed as "supposition" on the say-so of the voting machine company claiming "Trust us, nobody can flip votes" and even when security experts prove the opposite it doesn't matter because nobody can prove that those specific votes were flipped since the election data is unavailable and the machines almost never get audited.

In the incredibly rare case that a voting machine is audited, and the auditors find that it had been improperly manipulated and data deleted, with security logs removed and evidence of tampering, that's not enough to prove election fraud because without the security logs you can't prove that the votes were tampered with. And so it goes.

There are two ways of looking at democratic elections:

1. Elections must not just be fair but also seen to be fair, and if votes could have been fraudulently changed then we must assume that they were and reject the election results.

2. Or that election results are fair by definition, and unless you can point to which specific votes were fraudulently changed at what exact moment by which precise person, we must assume that the results are legitimate. If the results could have been changed, that does not matter unless you can prove that they were changed. (Which of course you cannot do in the mere weeks you have before the electors certify the results.)

The people of the USA expect #1 holds but the law operates on #2.