It’ll have to be short today, but … this is fascinating. See Aaron Blake at WaPo, The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud.
Executive summary: The Trump Team is still claiming voter fraud, but they admit they have no proof. Get this:
Rather than claiming evidence of proven fraud, it instead claims that the fraud is actually “undetectable,” because election officials made it so by doing illegal things. And that’s why it wants the results overturned.
“Despite the chaos of election night and the days which followed, the media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven,” the lawsuit says (and that proclamation is accurate). “But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”
Those sneaky election officials! Including the Republican ones! But Miz Lindsey has proposed that the Republican officials were conned by Stacey Abrams into doing these illegal things. Back to Aaron Blake:
“Whatever doubt there is about fraud by voters or political operatives,” it says, “there is no doubt that the officials of the Defendant States changed the rules of the contest in an unauthorized manner.”
It’s certainly a novel legal strategy, but it’s also one that reflects the last-ditch nature of the effort. The Trump team has spent weeks asserting that it could prove fraud or has proved fraud. It hasn’t — and in many cases lawyers like Giuliani have been forced to admit in court that they aren’t alleging actual fraud in specific cases — so now the argument is that this is beside the point. The real point, it seems, is that fraud could have occurred but that we might never see it because elections officials made it that way.
The arguments that there was fraud include the claim that no presidential candidate has lost both Florida and Ohio and won the presidency (see: John F. Kennedy, 1960). Also, ” It ridiculously suggests that late vote shifts in key states were astronomically improbable — to the tune of 1 in 1 quadrillion — a claim which Philip Bump dispatches here.”
See also:
David Cohen, Rolling Stone, Trump’s ‘Big’ Texas Supreme Court Lawsuit Is Just as Fake as All the Others
Charles Pierce, Esquire, The Confederacy of Dunces Wants to Disenfranchise Millions of Americans