Trump lawyers mix up Michigan and Minnesota in latest court filing fail

It follows an election lawsuit filed in the wrong court

Sharing the letter "M" was apparently enough to confuse the Trump campaign's legal team into using data from Minnesota in an affidavit filed in Michigan.

In the latest court filing fail for the president's campaign, paperwork purporting to show evidence of voter fraud mixed up counties between the two states .

An Atlanta lawyer working for the campaign, L Lin Wood, on Wednesday filed an expert analysis of suspiciously high turnout in Democrat-leaning areas of Michigan, according to The New York Times.

 

But some of the counties identified in the affidavit are in Minnesota: Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee and Kandiyohi.

The apparent mix-up was first discovered by conservative legal website Powerline, with litigator John H Hinderaker writing it was likely made due to the state's similar abbreviations of MI and MN.

The Wisconsin county data was included in a nine-page affidavit from Russell James of the cybersecurity firm Allied Security Operations Group.

“This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn,” Mr Hinderaker wrote.

“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.”

Mr Wood did not immediately respond to The Independent's request for comment.

The analysis of voting patterns in battleground states using Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic software has been put forward by Rudy Giuliani as evidence of election fraud.

At Thursday's "path to victory" press conference, Mr Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell said the Dominion election system, supposedly created in Venezuela at the direction of its former leader Hugo Chavez, flipped votes across the country.

“One of (the software’s) most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden,” Ms Powell said.

This latest mix-up comes on the heels of the Trump campaign filing a lawsuit in the wrong court, the Federal Claims court instead of a District Court.  

While the United States Court of Federal Claims responded to the suit, Judge Elaine D Kaplan made clear the court's usual jurisdiction over monetary actions doesn't cover the Trump team’s claims against state and local governments.

"The complaint is captioned as though it were filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan," Ms Kaplan wrote.

"Instead, however, it was filed with this Court, presumably by accident."

The suit was transferred to the correct court in Michigan, where the complaint had already been filed.

The misfiling was first identified by CNN's Katelyn Polantz, who reported that the lawyer on record for the case said it was a mistake. Pacer, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records, supposedly misfiled the suit in the wrong court.