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I think it was a state judge, but it might depend on the state.

Here’s the post:

“Fitton may be right.
The election contest laws of most states require that the contestant identify those specific ballots that need to be disregarded. The laws don’t permit the admission of statistical anomalies into evidence.

For example, when Rossi lost the governorship of Washington to Gregoire in 2004, the judge in the contest refused to admit statistical arguments from the Republicans because Washington’s election contest law, cloned from California’s election contest law, cared only about specific ballots that should not have been counted. That Washington’s election contest law was in violation of the Washington Constitution’s election fraud provision was never litigated.

Electronic voting blurs the issue. The mixing of good and bad ballots blurs the issue. The destruction of ballots blurs the issue. All these circumstances make it difficult to separate good ballots from bad. If the watermark story is true, that changes things, but we don’t know for sure. Proving Operation Hammer would require an exact count of what had been tampered with. The trail of evidence has been obfuscated to the point where it may be impossible to get to an accurate count.

Fitton may offer a way out.

The federal election law enacted in the 1840s requires that federal elections be conducted in all states on the same day, and the law specified the November date we’ve used for over 150 years. To my way of thinking, early voting is a violation of the law, and so is vote-by-mail. To me, the law requires that voters report to a polling station in person on the date specified. This is an interesting argument.

There is a 14th Amendment angle to be considered. If some states have violated the 1840s federal election law and some have followed it, the failure of one state cannot be permitted to damage another state’s interest by way of the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause as far as the choice of presidential electors is concerned.

The 14th has been the source of much constitutional mischief from One Man/One Vote to anchor babies to abortion. This could be a way to use the 14th to stop the theft of a presidential election, not at the individual state level, but at the federal level itself.

So what would be the Supreme Court’s remedy?

One remedy could require the removal of all ballots except those cast in person on election day. That’s tricky because you would need strict ballot segregation, and that is probably not honored in an election as corrupt as this one.

Another remedy would throw out the current election and require a new election supervised by trustworthy authorities. That would mean supervision by federal law enforcement to include the military in some form. This is dicey because this would be legislating from the bench. An originalist Court would be loathe to try this. Only Congress could write a new election law that would be signed by the president, and the Democrats would have no interest in doing this. Add to this that certain dates involving the beginning of a new Congress and a presidential term are hard-coded in the Constitution itself and limit the available time window.

The most likely remedy would be for the Court to throw up its hands, declare that the election was conducted in gross violation of the 1840s election law and invoke Article II/Section 1 of the Constitution remanding the choice of presidential electors to the state legislatures. This would be supported by the Court’s 1877 decision concerning the contested 1876 election. This would have to be invoked nationally unless some states did not use vote-by-mail or early voting.

This is a longshot, but it handles the problem of an entire national election being out of sync with existing law. “