Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging

[Jim Lane]

143. By the legal standard of evidence, there is evidence.

I'm a lawyer admitted to practice in New York. If this question were being litigated in a New York trial court, quite a bit of the information presented in this thread would be deemed admissible evidence.

The legal standard for "evidence" is not "proves beyond a shadow of a doubt" or even the "proves beyond a reasonable doubt" used in criminal cases -- and it isn't even the "makes it more likely than not" standard for a verdict in civil cases. The standard for admissibility of evidence is that it makes the proposition at issue more likely than it would be without that evidence. (There are other rules, of course, such as the exclusion of hearsay.)

The legal system, which has evolved over centuries' worth of experience in resolving disputes of this sort, recognizes that, as a general rule, there won't be one piece of evidence that wraps up the whole question. A jury is supposed to consider the evidence as a whole.

While I'm in lecture mode: Nonlawyers sometimes use the phrase "circumstantial evidence" to mean "flimsy evidence" or even "worthless evidence". That's wrong. It simply means that the evidence is indirect. If the eyewitness saw the defendant stab the victim, that's direct evidence. If the eyewitness instead merely saw the defendant running down the street, away from the scene of the stabbing, soon after the time when the coroner estimates that the stabbing occurred, that's circumstantial evidence. It's perfectly good evidence. With enough circumstantial evidence, you can even get a criminal conviction, let alone a civil verdict.

Your repeated demand for evidence isn't articulated very precisely but I'm guessing that you reject what you've been shown so far because it's circumstantial evidence. Referring again to centuries of experience, I can tell you that your heightened standard for what counts as evidence has not commended itself to lawmakers, judges, and juries in the course of the Anglo-American legal tradition.