This is bad. We may lose Wisconsin. (IMPORTANT UPDATE: It's worse than I thought)

If you're like me, you became susceptible to the disease of optimism. 

 

Optimism seeped into our souls because Trump's lawyers failed again and again. Rudy G humiliated himself repeatedly, almost as if he had a fetish for degradation. The Kraken turned out to be a crack-head's hallucination. For a hilarious point-by-point takedown of Sidney P's insane claims, see the latest episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, titled "What's Kraken?"

Although I'm a notorious worry-wart, I never fretted (much) about anything Sidney has had to say. She's a toon. Crap like this won't impress anyone outside of the Q cult.

I am, however, unnerved by this news.

President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Wisconsin seeking to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s win there, the latest long-shot court battle aimed at overturning the presidential election.

The suit asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the state’s two most Democratic counties. Biden won the state by nearly 20,700 votes.

What makes this lawsuit different from all of the bullshit legal claims we've seen so far? Simple: The latest suit has a legit basis. This analysis seems quite non-partisan and non-paranoid.

We already know the issues that will be raised in that lawsuit. As Trump tweeted: “The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count,” and that is true. His recount observers were not instructed to argue with the tabulation. They were instead instructed to watch for ballots that they could challenge. They found around 238,000 of them. 

Trump’s Wisconsin lawsuit will not be like those filed in other states. There will be evidence: the disputed ballots. And he will not be challenging them based on vague accusations or outlandish theories. He will cite specific state laws that he will argue have been violated.

I haven’t seen the case he will file in court tomorrow, but based on the petition he filed to get the recount, we know there will be three big issues.

1) State law requires voters to request their absentee ballots in writing, but voters who went to early in-person voting sites were allowed to request their ballots orally.

The counties cannot argue that these voters submitted written applications before they received their ballots. They didn’t. Everyone knows they didn’t, and the counties don’t have any written applications for those ballots. And they cannot say the law does not require a written application; it obviously does. Wisconsin’s voter activity records enabled the Trump legal team to compile very specific evidence: not just the number of voters who voted this way, but a list of their names.

2) State law requires clerks to return incomplete absentee ballot envelopes to the voters, but in both Dane and Milwaukee Counties, election staff made a habit of adding missing witness addresses to the absentee ballots that were missing that information. Typically, they used a different color ink or initialed their additions to show that it was they, not the voters, who completed that section of the absentee ballot. So it was easy for the Trump recount observers to pick those ballots out and challenge them.

3) State law says that absentee voters must submit a photo ID before they can get their absentee ballots unless they are “indefinitely confined due to age, physical illness, or infirmity.” Thousands of absentee voters claimed to be indefinitely confined when they requested their November ballots–many more than in any previous election. Because neither county had a huge increase in the number of people with disabilities, it’s very likely that many of these voters simply didn’t want to have to submit a photo ID when they requested their absentee ballots.

For the full argument, hit the link.

Wisconsin has only ten electoral votes, so this challenge -- if successful -- cannot prevent Biden from becoming president, since he already has 309 electors and 270 are needed to win. The three arguments listed above are based on state laws not replicated elsewhere. If similar issues affected the absentee votes in the other states, Trump's lawyers would surely have acted by now. 

Here are the problems:

 

1. Dems have been able to brag that Biden's electoral college victory exactly matched Trump's 2016 win. I don't want to be deprived of that boast.

 

2. Despite the claimed technical violations of Wisconsin's overly-stringent laws on absentee ballots, it seems clear that the majority of Wisconsin voters preferred Joe Biden. Their will should prevail.

 

3. An overturned result in any one state will, of course, cause the conspiracy-mongers and militia maniacs to go freakin' nuts. Revisionism, paranoid fantasias, stab-in-the-back theories -- we'll be dealing with this madness throughout all the years of the Biden presidency, and perhaps for decades thereafter. 

Naturally, the points I've raised will be censored from D.U. and Kos, due to their strictly-enforced anti-pessimism policies. But facts are facts, and state law is state law. This suit really is different.

UPDATE: Team Trump was knocked down in Pennsylvania, but they now hope to take the issue to the Supreme Court. The argument is that Pennsylvania's new "no reason needed" mail-in ballot law violates the state's constitution. The state's Supreme Court quashed this suit on the grounds that the Trumpers waited too long. 

Will the U.S. Supreme Court take on the case, and will they agree with this argument?

If they do hear the case and if they don't agree with the lower court, then Trump will have PA and -- in all likelihood -- WI. This would give him 30 more electors.