> I keep hearing from conservatives that the actual evidence was never properly examined in court, and that the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal s

> I keep hearing from conservatives that the actual evidence was never properly examined in court, and that the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing. I'd like to try to address the first bit there, and maybe ask a question on the second. Warning: I am not a lawyer. ---- First up: "the actual evidence was never properly examined in court" This depends very heavily on what "properly examined" means. There's absolutely no question that evidence was filed in several lawsuits, so it's definitely seen by both the judge and defendants. The evidence has also been explicitly mentioned in rulings, so there's no question it was at least considered by the judge. For example, take Law v. Whitmer, from Nevada [0]: > The Court nonetheless considers the totality of the evidence provided by Contestants in reaching and ruling upon the merits of their claims. > Contestants offered Mr. Baselice to opine on the incidence of illegal voting in the 2020 General Election based on a phone survey of voters. > The Court questions Mr. Baselice's methodology because he was unable to identify the source of the data for his survey and conducted no quality control of the data he received. > Contestants offered Mr. Kamzol to opine that significant illegal voting occurred in Nevada during the 2020 General Election, based on his analysis of various commercially available databases of voters. > The Court questions Mr. Kamzol's methodology because he had little to no information or supervision over the origins of his data, the manner in which it had been matched, and what the rate of false positives would be. Additionally, there was little or no verification of his numbers. > ... > As reflected herein, the Court finds that the expert testimony provided by Contestants was of little to no value. The Court did not exclude consideration of this evidence, which it could have, but gave it very little weight. This wasn't the only case where the evidence was explicitly examined; Bowyer v. Ducey from Arizona [1], and King v. Whitmer from Michigan [2] are also cases where the evidence is explicitly called out in rulings (and there are probably others as well). So the evidence was definitely examined in at least some cases; what a "proper" examination would entail, I don't know. Another thing to note is that courts generally have rules about what evidence is considered admissible; evidence that doesn't meet certain standards (e.g., hearsay) generally cannot be used in a lawsuit. Even expert testimony may be excluded if it doesn't meet the standards used by the court (e.g., Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 702 governs expert testimony). In other words, it's not enough to just have evidence; the evidence needs to meet certain quality thresholds. The plaintiffs can complain that their evidence wasn't examined, but if it's not good evidence that's really on them. One last thing is that one also needs to consider whether further examination would even matter. If your lawsuit is deficient enough that the outcome is obvious early in the proceedings, it makes no sense for a judge to order discovery, evidentiary hearings, etc. ---- Next: "the cases were mostly dismissed on issues of legal standing." The thing is that cases can be dismissed for multiple reasons. If a case is dismissed both for standing issues and on its merits, does that count as "just" a dismissal for issues of standing? The other problem here is that, at least on the federal level, courts are only allowed to hear specific suits ("cases" and "controversies"). This has been interpreted to include standing; in other words, a federal court can't skip standing just because it wants to see the case move forwards. Standing for state courts is determined based on each state's laws, so it isn't really feasible to give a blanket description, but suffice to say, if a state's laws say that a plaintiff must establish standing, and a plaintiff fails to do so, the court must dismiss the case. ---- > Electronic voting has always been criticized, so I don't know why this year should be any different. But that just seems worse, that potentially decades' worth of elections could have been tampered with if any of those Dominion claims are true? One thing to note is that it's usually purely electronic voting that gets the most criticism. The voting machines in the most contested states all had paper trails, which generally alleviates the worst of the criticism. ---- [0]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/20-OC-00163-Order-Granting-Motion-to-Dismiss-Statement-of-Contest.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... [1]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/12/Order-Granting-MTD.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... [2]: https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/2020/11/Preview_7405F132-B4F1-4A0A-9BB1-28CB11C48E21.pdf https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/... Edit: Add missing cite