I was under the impression that none of the cases involving accusations of fraudulent activity were ever contested in court; they were dismissed outright. Is it true there were absolutely no court hearings?
It is not.
Now, I'm not a lawyer but I'm friends with a couple of them and due to my professional background I have a decent understanding of the legal process, civil and criminal. So I may be wrong on a couple of the minor details, but here is what happened:
-Court cases are filed in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, purportedly alleging massive voter fraud and asking for relief.
-The court in both cases accepts that the plaintiffs have standing and allow the suits to go ahead.
-When the lawyers appear before the court to make their arguments (and I mean Giuliani personally among others), the lawyers for the defendants (the Democrats and the Biden campaign) stipulate (that is, both sides, plaintiff and defendant, agree on the substance of a particular fact or set of facts, like the sky is blue for example) and make their arguments from the standpoint of "this is the truth as accepted by both sides and not in dispute") that no meaningful fraud occurred. As with any legal motion, however, the other side has a right to object on the merits; that is, let's say the other side says the sky is actually gray. If there is an objection, then the judge goes "Okay, let's hear the evidence from each side." Now, you might be wondering what happens if a judge overrules the objection when it's valid, and I'll get to that a bit later, but the short form is, that's something that would be perfectly valid and tailor-made for an appeal.
Anyway, when the stipulation comes up, Giuliani and Co readily agree to the stipulation (that is, the Democrats go "We stipulate that there was no meaningful fraud", the judge says "Mr. Giuliani, do you object to the stipulation?" and Rudy's response is "No, Your Honor, we do not object."
That happened in both the Pennsylvania and Wisconsin cases. And the Wisconsin judge, a Trump appointee to the bench, I might add, went "Wait, what?"
Now, some of the othee cases were dismissed before discovery that might have uncovered stuff, but as Battlegrinder noted above, you can't just sue someone and then look for evidence.
That's not to say that everything was perfectly above board, mind you, but for any case there is a serious burden of proof, especially if the allegation being made is one that would likely result in criminal charges as well. But in order to establish this, the plaintiff needs to make sure they've crossed every t and dotted every i, because in something like this where you're already facing an uphill climb in trying to get a court to *overturn an entire election*, you absolutely need to be on the ball. And the GOP and Trump campaign, especially in Pennsylvania and Arizona, were not.