Bear in mind that she's a self-described "poll challenger", which is a partisan position. We can reasonably infer that she is a strong supporter of Trump and therefore is not impartial.
That's a fair point, which is why challenged ballots get marked as "challenged" and not "rejected".
It is the duty of the observers to challenge ballots.
It is the duty of the election workers to record these challenges, which wasn't happening.
The only reason her challenge should have been denied is if she was shown to be challenging ballots indiscriminately or she was preventing the election workers from doing their jobs. To my knowledge, there has not been any evidence that this was the case.
It is not the Trump legal team's responsibility to prove that this woman (and the others like her) was impartial. Their only obligation is to provide a "preponderance of evidence" that supports their case. Given the large number of affidavits that their team has provided of a similar nature, it seems reasonable that the case should be allowed to be heard in a manner that takes both sides seriously.
> Given the large number of affidavits that their team has provided of a similar nature, it seems reasonable that the case should be allowed to be heard in a manner that takes both sides seriously.
Before presenting evidence, you have to present a legal argument for which the evidence would provide factual substantiation. The vast majority of the Trump- and Trump-allied-lawsuits have failed at that and been dismissed for that reason. The number of affidavits is immaterial if you don't have a legal argument for them to support which, if the facts were on your side, would support the remedy you are asking for.
Several of the lawsuits have been dismissed on the general basis that "election laws being broken is not evidence that fraud occurred".
It's logically a true statement, and I think it's a fair opinion to have.
But I do disagree with it: The laws regarding poll observers are designed to detect fraud. It is extremely hard to detect fraud when the poll observers aren't allowed to do their job, or when their challenges are ignored.
I get that the optics are bad: throwing out hundreds of thousands of ballots doesn't make anyone look good.
But what's the point of election laws if ultimately it doesn't matter when they are broken?
I'm not an expert in election laws, but I would be very curious if this standard of proving fraud has generally been applied for previous election cases in the same way.
> Several of the lawsuits have been dismissed on the general basis that "election laws being broken is not evidence that fraud occurred".
I do not believe that is correct. I have seen none for which that is the case.
Several have been dismissed because (1) process changes that they claimed violated election laws were well-known long before the election and, if they were illegal, had a viable remedy before the election, but the actions were not filed until after the election with no good cause for delay, and were thus barred by laches, (2) they made allegations which were incoherent in the light of the applicable election law and procedures, (3) because the remedy requested was factually impossible (e.g., cases asking for the ballot count to be halted because observers were allegedly denied access and until that access was restored that reached the court after ballot counting had completed, cases seeking delays in certification of results that has already occurred, etc.), (4) because the plaintiffs failed to present evidence of the specific allegation in the case, and (5) [what appears to be the single most common reason] because, after grabbing headlines by filing the suit, it was voluntarily withdrawn by the plaintiffs. This last seems particularly common with cases filed by Trump, though Trump-allied groups have also withdrawn a lot of suits.
