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Comment by vergessenmir | Hacker News Reader

I believe you're referring to the lawsuit from last year filed by the Texas attorney general. It's a complaint where nothing has been proved in relation to the scanning of WhatsApp backups.

Unless there's something new on this case that I haven't seen?

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I know nothing about the case, but surely "nothing has been proved" just means there hasn't been an outcome yet? Attorney generals tend not to file cases unless they believe something to be true, at the very least on the balance of probabilities.

This is not true in Texas and other red states. The Attorney General of Texas files political cases that have no basis in law or fact. He filed the election lawsuit which was soundly rejected by SCOTUS, for instance.

To be fair, the merits of that case were never decided.

The case was rejected on procedural grounds for lack of standing - a decision that has been hotly debated by many legal experts.

Did you ever actually read the filing? [1] I recommend it, very approachable.

If nothing else, the math and statistics cited should be of interest.

[1] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...

I've perused that filing in the past. Most of the language is about how votes "could" be fraudulent, with little to no actual proof that votes were cast or counted fraudulently.

I do remember it using that "1 in quadrillion" statistic that appeared pretty questionable even on the surface.

> If nothing else, the math and statistics cited should be of interest.

This is true, but only because it is such an amazing example of bad statistics. It asserts that there is a “less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States”. It bases this on two things.

First is that Trump had an early lead, so it is statistically impossible for Biden to have ended up winning. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that votes are not randomly distributed and mail in votes heavily favored Biden.

Second, that Biden performed better when compared to Clinton in 2016. Obviously, it fails to account for the fact that people vote differently at different times and for different people. The same differences would be seen comparing Kerry/Obama or Dole/Bush.

> Attorney generals tend not to file cases unless they believe something to be true, at the very least on the balance of probabilities.

This is pretty easy to debunk.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...

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