The claims that the Dominion voting machines miscounted (on accident or purposefully) have been addressed by hand recounts of the physical ballots. That was done for all of Georgia, and I believe in several other locations, and the hand counts matched the machine counts within the normal margin of error for a hand count.

Another claim about the voting machines is that they were fed extra ballots. For example, a poll worker said they saw another poll working repeatedly running a set of ballots through one of the machines.

Sounds bad, right? It turns out that part of the testing to verify machine are working is to run test ballots repeatedly through machines in a test environment not connected to the live environment. That is what the worker was witnessing. That this would happen and is a normal part of the process was covered in a poll working training session that that poll worked had not bothered to attend.

There were claims of Republican observers not being allowed in to observe in Pennsylvania. That is in fact true--some observers were not allowed in. That was because there was already the maximum legally allowed number of observers, split equally among Democrats and Republicans.

There were claims that a bunch of ballots were smuggled in, in Pennsylvania if I recall correctly. There was even a short video from surveillance cameras showing boxes of ballots being taken out from under a table and opened and added to the queue to be counted.

But if you looked at the full video, you'd see that those were ballots that had been in the queue to be counted, and when it was time to take a break from counting had been placed in the official ballot storage containers, locked, and stored under the table. All the purported proof of fraud video clip showed is the normal resumption of counting after a break.

There was a claim based on a worker reporting a bunch of mail in ballots being counted that did not have signatures on the ballots. True--but in the state the signatures were on the envelopes, not the ballots themselves. The procedure, which was carried out, is that workers open the outer envelope, take out the signed inner envelope, check the signature on the inner envelope, and if it matches the on file signature, open the inner envelope, remove the ballot, and add it to the queue of ballots to be counted.

Pretty much everything being offered as evidence of fraud has been like that--people seeing normal procedures that have been used without controversy and accepted by both parties for ages, not understanding them, and saying it must be fraud.

There have been claims not based on fraud. Most notable is Wisconsin, where plaintiffs claimed that the election officials had misinterpreted the state's election rules and had been conducting elections in an invalid way.

The state Supreme Court agreed with that one, and Wisconsin will have to change its procedures. But the court refused to throw out the election because Wisconsin had been using that procedure for years (it was actually put in place by Republicans about a decade ago). They were not going to take the extraordinary step of invalidating the entire election (and it would have to be not just the Presidential election...it would have to be every election in the state, and arguably past elections too). And they were especially not going to grant the plaintiffs' request to just throw out the election in counties where Biden won but leave it standing were Trump won.

As far as courts not considering the evidence goes, much of that seems to be based on the idea that since the cases have not gone to trial the court must not have looked at the evidence.

For some of the cases that is correct. If plaintiffs don't have standing, or the court does not have jurisdiction, the court will dismiss the case without looking at evidence. Plaintiffs can go refile in an appropriate court.

But for the cases where the plaintiffs did have standing and filed in the right court, the court will examine the evidence as part of considering defendant's motion to dismiss. If all you've got is vague accusations rather than concrete evidence, you aren't going to get very far.

It is one thing to say in a press conference that you have a ton of concrete evidence that you are going to take to court. When you actually get to court, you have to present that concrete evidence in your civil complaint. They have tended to either not do that, or the evidence will obviously not be admissible at trial--often it has been hearsay, or hearsay of hearsay, or even more levels of hearsay than that.

> This is keeping me up at night, feeling like the whole exercise of democracy could be a total sham, and possibly always was.

It might help to consider this. Many of the judges tossing out these cases have been staunch conservative judges appointed by Trump, picked by Trump and McConnell specifically because they could be counted on to reliable issue solidly conservative rulings. Yet plaintiffs have done no better with them than they have done with liberal judges.

To believe that they are all in on some sort of election rigging requires believing that the people rigging the election are vastly powerful. They can pretty much ensure any election outcome they want. But then you have to explain why this all powerful group forgot to rig things so they would get a solid Senate majority too.