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In Bush v. Gore, Breyer and Souter joined Kennedy and O’Connor and the three conservative Justices in ruling that the different recount standards in each county violated the Equal Protection Clause.

But even if Breyer had ‘t joined that opinion, it wouldn’t matter. Trump won, and nothing that they find in any recount will change that. There is no reason to think that the optical scanners in MI could have missed over 10,000, and even if they did, there’s no reason to suspect that the WI count was off by more than 24,000. And even if somehow both results are overturned, there still would be Trump’s comfortable volictory in PA, a state with no paper ballots, so Trump’s floor is 280 electoral votes. This whole recount thing is a find-raising and e-mail-address-gathering ploy by the Green Party. Conservative groups pull this kind of crap all the time (the part about fundraising for nonexistent threats, not the part about seeking ridiculous recounts), and the Greens want to join in the fun.

I’ve looked at county data in MI, WI and PA, and compared it to that in MN, IA and OH. I’ve akso looked at town-kevel data for MI (which became available in Leip’s site a coupke of days ago). The only potentially suspicious thing about the results in MI, WI and PA is tbat thrnout was lower than one would expect in Mikwaukee County and in the WOW collar counties to its north and west, albeit nit by enough that it would erase Trump’s lead. Part of the drop-off may have been due to a large number of blacks staying home because Obama wasn’t on the ballot and a smaller number of affluent whites staying home because they didn’t like Trump or Hillary (Romney ran much stronger in the WOW counties than did Trump, and the same was true for just about every other affluent suburban area—even the most rock-ribbed Republican—in the nation). But another contributing factor may have been the state’s voter-ID requirement. When did it come into effect?