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Comment by greggturkington | Hacker News Reader

HUGE leap to compare those to Trump and his attorneys falsely asserting widespread election fraud in public, and filing over 50 lawsuits across states

> Al Gore presided over the meeting in 2001. He overruled these objections because no senator joined them

> Senator Barbara Boxer [...] joined Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones [...] lodge a formal objection to Ohio’s electoral votes. The objection compelled Congress to spend two hours in debate

Two hours in debate! You're really comparing that?

(There was no vote in 2000 or 2016, so that isn't true)

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The individual members of Congress aren’t the President.

You can form whatever opinion you like on the merits of the objections, but the end result is the same. In three separate elections this century there were Democrats in Congress who voted against certifying the election results.

You can hand wave it away as much as you like. The facts will remain. It’s on the voting record.

> In three separate elections this century there were Democrats in Congress who voted against certifying the election results.

No, there weren’t. The only votes on objections to an electoral tally prior to 2020 in this century (counting 2000 as “in this century”, to avoid ambiguity) were in 2004.

In 2000 and 2016 there were no votes, because votes only occur after the count is stopped for debate on an objection, which only occurs when a legal objection is filed, which (1) must be in writing, and (2) must be signed by both a Senator and a member of the House of Representatives.

In 2000 and 2016 some members of the House engaged in floor stunts proposing objections which were not signed by a member of a Senate, which resulted in no debate or vote as they were ruled out of order because, well, they were out of order.

> You can hand wave it away as much as you like. The facts will remain. It’s on the voting record.

Yeah, the voting record is against you here, so you probably want to stop waving your hands in its general direction.

The individual members of Congress voted based on the president's actions.

> there were Democrats in Congress who voted against certifying the election results

Right, and one of them was a two hour debate.

You'd be gullible enough compare that to not supporting a campaign of bad-faith lawsuits across states that were clearly not based in voter fraud (and usually dismissed as a result). The most specific thing they have in common is "members of Congress voted."

Al Gore and George Bush had lawsuits going for many weeks that ultimately went to the Supreme Court.

Florida counties ran an automated recount, as required by law. Under Florida law, candidates could request a manual recount as well. Bush sued to stop the recount, and won. Gore conceded on December 13.

Details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

Contrast this to 2020, where there were 86 lawsuits after the election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...

And Trump's team had tens of lawsuits across Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Michigan. Many of them dismissed without merit.

You're comparing that to Bush v Gore?!

What's wrong with lawsuits? You should want the election contested legally. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I agree you should want the election contested legally.

Trump and his attorneys falsely asserting widespread election fraud in public statements you should not want.

Absolutely agree. We should want elections contested legally, in the courts, no matter what the whacked out crazy or inherently false claims there might be. That's what the courts are there for and it's really IMO why they are a third branch, not a subsidiary, of the government. Let the lawsuits go forward. Let the courts decide on their merits, so we have finality and case law for the future. IMHO it was a mistake for the Supreme Court not to hear the Texas lawsuit. It almost certainly was not going to prevail, but by summarily declining to even hear the case, it undermines the judiciaries independence.

The courts DID decide on the Texas case, though. When a case is presented to the SC that "is almost certainly not going to prevail", this often (and undoubtedly so in the texas case) means that there is a fundamental misunderstanding or misrepresentation of law that is so egregious there is no opinion to be had. This is exactly what the SC justices said in this case:

> The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot. [1]

The courts essentially decided the cases have no merit to rule on.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p86...

Hillary is asking for a 2016 election investigation.

She also said this summer Biden shouldn't concede under any circumstance.

There's dirt everywhere if you look for it.

I see an awful lot of hand waving in your response. “But this situation is different”

The crux of the issue isn’t how much time they wasted it’s the fact that they objected to a legitimate election.

Google needs to grow a pair and take a stand. But they won’t because it was never about that in the first place.

The situation is different. Objections in 2000 (in particular) were not about the overall result of the election, but complaints about long lines and voting access not being good enough and shining a light on changing things in order to get more voting accessibility. 2020 was about tossing out legitimate votes results in states that people didn't like the overall results of. Note that none of the re-elected candidates in the states in 2020 were saying their election was in any way invalid despite how much shade they were throwing on the entire system.

And this situation is about complaints about poll observers not having a proper access to observe the voting process. And ultimately, the objections in 2000 changed the overall result of the election.

> And ultimately, the objections in 2000 changed the overall result of the election.

There weren’t any objections even technically filed. There were attempts to offer objections that didn’t meet the legal standard, which were ruled out of order.

If you mean the recount and associated lawsuits, then, no, that didn’t either. Bush won both before and after that.

Now, if you slice apart some subset of the recount/lawsuit process apart from others, you can say that, but that’s a rather artificial definition, and, anyway, there is a difference between lawsuits over who should be certified in a state and throwing out a state’s electoral votes in Congress.

> And ultimately, the objections in 2000 changed the overall result of the election

How so?

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