GOP lawyers confuse Minnesota and Michigan in Georgia case they lost

• Lin Wood, a GOP lawyer allied with President Donald Trump, filed a lawsuit in Georgia to stop its Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, from certifying the election results.
• Wood lost the case, and a Georgia lawyer named Andrew Fleischman pointed out that his lawsuit also included an affidavit that appeared to confuse Michigan’s election results with Minnesota’s.
• The affidavit was filed by a Texas cybersecurity expert named Russell Ramsland and laid out a number of “statistical anomalies and red flags” that showed Michigan’s election results were “manipulated” because the number of votes cast in 19 precincts exceeded the number of registered voters.
• But the 19 precincts Ramsland listed were in Minnesota, not Michigan. In other words, he “was counting the population of towns in Minnesota, seeing they did not match Michigan towns, and finding fraud,” Fleischman wrote.
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A Republican celebrity lawyer allied with President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in Georgia that confused the states of Michigan and Minnesota.

The lawyer, Lin Wood, is a staunch conservative and asked a court to halt the certification of election results in Georgia, alleging that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, hurt him as a voter by agreeing to a settlement over signature-matching on ballots in March.

Wood’s lawsuit included over a dozen affidavits that his lawyers argued proved his case. But one of those affidavits, filed by a Texas resident and cybersecurity expert named Russell Ramsland, centered entirely on election results in Michigan and not Georgia. More than that, as one Georgia lawyer named Andrew Fleischman pointed out, the Ramsland affidavit appeared to confuse Minnesota (MN) for Michigan (MI).

Ramsland highlighted a number of “statistical anomalies and red flags” that he claimed proved “that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan.” Specifically, he said he discovered 19 precincts in Michigan where the number of votes cast in the general election exceeded the number of registered voters in the county.

But Ramsland had confused precincts in Minnesota with those in Michigan. In other words, he “was counting the population of towns in Minnesota, seeing they did not match Michigan towns, and finding fraud,” Fleischman wrote.

US District Judge Steven Grimberg, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, dismissed Wood’s lawsuit on Thursday, saying, “To halt the certification at literally the eleventh hour would breed confusion and disenfranchisement that I find have no basis in fact and law.”

“It is well established that garden-variety election disputes do not rise to the level of a constitutional deprivation,” Grimberg ruled. “The fact that his candidate didn’t win doesn’t rise to the level of harm.”

Wood said on Twitter Thursday that he would appeal the decision. On Thursday evening, Georgia completed its risk-limiting audit, in which election officials did a hand recount of the more than five million paper ballots that were cast in the election.

The final tally showed that President-elect Joe Biden received 49.5% of the vote and President Donald Trump received 49.3%, cementing Biden’s Georgia’s win by more than 12,000 votes and ensuring he will get the state’s 16 Electoral College votes. Raffensperger is set to certify the results on Friday.