Another winner from Trump’s crack legal team
By 
Their latest attempt to prove widespread voter fraud literally proceeded on the basis that “MN” is the abbreviated form of “Michigan”:
An affidavit filed by President Trump’s legal team intended to prove voter fraud in Michigan apparently used data taken from counties in Minnesota, the latest in a series of embarrassing missteps that have made Mr. Trump’s uphill legal fight even steeper.
As part of the Trump campaign’s effort to discredit the results in battleground states, the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell have made a series of unsubstantiated and outlandish claims that Dominion Voting Systems, which sells voting software to states, electronically erased millions of Trump votes at the secret behest of liberal operatives.
To bolster that claim, they have pointed to areas that had abnormally high turnout rates compared to prior elections, most recently as part of a case filed in Georgia intended to show a nationwide pattern of fraud.
On Wednesday, L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta lawyer working with the team, filed an analysis from Russell Ramsland, a failed Republican congressional candidate and self-proclaimed election fraud expert, purporting to show suspiciously high turnout in blue areas of Michigan.
When the editors of Powerline, a conservative legal website whose contributors hail from Minnesota and other parts of the Upper Midwest, reviewed the nine-page document, they discovered a major problem: Many municipalities cited in the Michigan document — Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi — are located in an entirely different “M” state, Minnesota.
“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn,” wrote John H. Hinderaker, a veteran litigator who believes any incidences of fraud are not on the scale Mr. Trump’s team is claiming.
Mr. Hinderaker surmised the error was the result of mixing up the abbreviations for the two states, “MI” for “MN.”
Reaching the “getting totally owned by Hindrocket” stage of ineptitude is impressive.
Obviously, in any sane world the embarrassingly awful quality of the Trump legal team’s arguments would be calling Republican elites to say enough is enough. But to the authoritarian mind, the weakness of the arguments is just part of the game. Mike Shirkey doesn’t think there was actual widespread voter fraud; he just thinks that Black votes shouldn’t count in determining Michigan’s presidential electors just as they don’t count when determining control of the state legislature.
If it wasn’t the vote dumps, it would be something else. People who want to throw out thousands of black votes across several states is not about actual fraud. The fraud is black participation in the polity, they just need a way to say it that allows them to lie to themselves.— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) November 20, 2020