I'm a libertarian and honestly? Both parties use courts selectively depending on whether they win or lose. What bothers me isn't Trump losing court cases - it's that we've created a system where one guy can spend two years contesting an election and still have 30% of the country convinced. That's a sign our institutions have failed at building confidence, regardless of who's right about 2020.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Losing court cases doesn't prove the election was stolen any more than winning them would prove it wasn't. The courts require specific evidence of fraud that would change outcomes in specific jurisdictions. That's a high bar - as it should be. Did Trump have evidence? The Manhattan jury sure seemed to think some of his actions around the election were problematic enough to convict him on. Make of that what you will.

Look, I get why people are skeptical of institutions, but this particular line of reasoning doesn't hold up. If there was genuine fraud, wouldn't at least ONE of these 60+ cases have succeeded? Judges appointed by Republicans included. The math doesn't work.

The courts looked at the actual evidence - or lack thereof - and made decisions based on law, not politics. When Rudy showed up with nothing concrete, judges threw cases out. That's the system working.

Okay so here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud - if you believed the election was stolen, wouldn't you present whatever evidence you had, even if it was circumstantial or 'just asking questions'? Instead we got Sidney Powell talking about Dominion machines connecting to Venezuela, Rudy's hair dye running, and... nothing concrete ever materialized. At some point you have to ask whether the goal was actually proving fraud or just maintaining power and donor enthusiasm. Both things can be true, by the way - Trump might have believed something fishy happened AND his team might have known they had nothing legally actionable.

I think people forget that Trump's own Attorney General, his campaign lawyers, his DHS officials, and Republican election officials all said there was no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome. His legal team had every resource imaginable. They just didn't have a case.

People need to understand what happened with the fake electors scheme, the Raffensperger call where Trump literally asked someone to 'find 11,780 votes,' and January 6th. These aren't theories - they're documented, often on tape. The courts didn't reject a fraud case; they rejected cases that had no standing, lacked evidence, or were legally frivolous. That's different. Meanwhile Trump got convicted in Manhattan partly on election-related conduct. So the question isn't really 'why did courts reject this' - it's 'why did Trump's team never actually try to prove it in court if they had evidence'? And the answer might be that evidence and courtrooms are two different things when you're talking about a sitting president and political pressure.

The real problem is that people who already didn't trust institutions weren't going to trust a court decision anyway. Courts said no fraud = systemic corruption to a certain segment of the population. Courts would have said fraud = the system working to another segment. We have a legitimacy crisis that predates Trump and will outlast him, and nobody wants to actually address it because it requires admitting both parties have eroded faith in government for decades.

This is a good question but it assumes the courts were the right venue to relitigate an election. State legislatures could have acted if they wanted to. Congress had the chance on January 6th. The fact that none of these bodies - controlled by Republicans in many cases - moved suggests maybe there just wasn't there there. That said, I do think the media's initial dismissal of 'election integrity questions' broadly was lazy, and it pushed people further into the Trump camp.