As we saw played out in a number of lawsuits filed in the aftermath of the election, the Trump campaign was not able to marshall that kind of specific, ballot-level evidentiary record to invalidate a discrete set of cast ballots that would reverse the numerical result. They had significant anecdotal evidence of irregular and highly suspicious behavior, as well as some expert testimony regard insecure and vulnerable voting processes, but that expert testimony did not provide an answer to the question “Which specific ballots cast by which identified voters were invalid and why?”

And that is what the Democrats have always counted on when shoving through invalid votes by any means necessary. The vote for President is unique because of the extraordinarily compressed timeframe regarding the vote of the Electoral College, making the procedural hurdles of a meaningful election contest insurmountable.

In a case dealing with a dispute regarding just about anything other than an election contest, the type of analysis done by Dr. Lott would be admissible and compelling because it would allow Dr. Lott to offer an expert opinion in the form of something like “But for the impact of fraudulent conduct, there is no other explanation for the outcome of the voting as reflected by the pattern analysis. In the absence of fraudulent influences, barring the existence of evidence of some other contributing factor, the outcome of the election would have been different.” //

What Dr. Lott did instead was to look at precinct-level voting data for those precincts on the county’s borders, and compare the data to contiguous precincts in the next county over.