Thread by @AkivaMCohen

Folks, you may be wondering about what looks like weirdness coming out of the Sidney Powell case down in Georgia. The court issued an order barring the defendants from erasing data from voting machines, and then rescinded that order very promptly afterward. Nothing unusual here

https://twitter.com/AkivaMCohen/status/1333160159380725763

First, a little background. Sydney's squid lawsuit (lol no I'm not calling that disaster the "kraken") alleged that voting machine data in Georgia would show evidence of a massive fraud. and she asked the court for an emergency order preventing Georgia from deleting that data

Now there are a couple of general rules about litigation. One of the Baseline rules is you cannot delete documents or data that is at issue in the litigation. That applies to every litigation in every Court in the country, from to neighbors battling about a fence line all the way

Up to litigation with potential National consequences like this one. So there was no need for any sort of special order to Georgia, the defendant in the litigation, requiring it to preserve data

Despite that, Howell informed the court that a particular County in Georgia, Union County, was talking about how it was about to wipe voting machine data. And so she asked the court to order the state of Georgia not to buy Penny voting machine data as part of an emergency motion

Given that not deleting data is a baseline legal obligation and it was an emergency motion, the court granted that part of the application and its order setting the expedited briefing schedule on the rest of Powell's motion, without waiting for Georgia to respond to the request

After it issued that order, someone, most likely the state of Georgia, pointed out to the court that the state of Georgia has exactly zero control over voting machines in Union County or any other Georgia County. The machines are County owned and controlled under Georgia law.

There's another Baseline rule in litigation. And that is that courts do not have jurisdiction over non parties to the litigation, and can't issue orders requiring non-parties to do or not do particular things. There are some caveats to that, where the non-party is related in some

way to a party. But none of those caveat apply here. Sidney and the squid only sued the state of Georgia and the Secretary of State. They did not bother suing the individual counties who actually own and control the voting machines

So the court couldn't issue an order requiring the County's to preserve data, and it couldn't issue an order requiring the state to preserve data on the voting machines, because the state of Georgia doesn't own, have custody over, or have control over that data to begin with

So once that was pointed out to the court, it rescinded the order. That's all

Wipe any
Sorry for the speech-to-text screw up. Hopefully the context was clear