As I have noted repeatedly thus far, it is healthy and important (in the atmosphere of conspiracy following this election) to have election challenges filed in court, both because of the moderating influence of having to settle on a story and put things in sworn filings and because courts — and the public — can then scrutinize the evidence, with all sides getting their day in court. But it is also clear that the lawyers lately rising to the top of Donald Trump’s legal team are not exactly doing top-notch work. John Hinderaker of Powerline, a longtime Minnesota lawyer, catches one particularly egregious error in “an affidavit signed by Russell Ramsland, a Texas resident who is an expert on cyber security. The affidavit was filed by Lin Wood in the Georgia lawsuit, but it relates entirely to Michigan. . . . The Ramsland affidavit is part of the Trump team’s case relating to Dominion.” What’s the error? Ramsland claimed to have found multiple Michigan precincts with suspiciously high numbers of votes compared to “Estimated Voters based on Reported Statistics.” But Hinderaker looked at the list of the precincts:

Here’s the problem: the townships and precincts listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 of the affidavit are not in Michigan. They are in Minnesota. Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi–these are all towns in Minnesota. I haven’t checked them all, but I checked a lot of them, and all locations listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 that I looked up are in Minnesota, with no corresponding township in Michigan. This would have been obvious to someone from this state, but Mr. Ramsland is a Texan and the lawyers are probably not natives of either Minnesota or Michigan.

Evidently a researcher, either Mr. Ramsland or someone working for him, was working with a database and confused “MI” for Minnesota with “MI” for Michigan. . . . This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn . . . has Mr. Ramsland inadvertently stumbled across evidence of voter fraud in Minnesota? I seriously doubt it. The venues in question are all in red Greater Minnesota, not in the blue urban areas where voter fraud is common.

Can’t anybody here play this game?