Blustery day in Madison; windy and wet, light snow falling, but not sticking. An unwelcome reminder that the constrictedness of our current way of life is going to be harder to handle when the ground’s frozen solid and you have to Hoth up to go outside. Still: this wave of cases has clearly crested in Dane County, which even at the severest moments has been spared the worst of what’s hit Wisconsin these past few months.
And bluster in the State Capitol, as legislators, whether they actually believe this or just feel constrained by political realities to say so, are arguing that my vote and the votes of my fellow Wisconsinites shouldn’t count, and that those legislators should be empowered to choose our Presidential electors in our stead. I prefer the sad wet snow.
Quomodocumque 
If your legislature were to have chosen your electors, it is not because your vote didn’t count. Instead, it would have been a last ditch effort at your vote actually counting. You see, if our elections have been compromised, which I only tonight have finally come to the horrible conclusion that they have, our legislatures are only trying to make the actual vote legitimate, which was one opposed to what you had wanted. With an illegitimate election, the only way for your vote to count is if the actual winner of the actual election is chosen, or else none of our votes count. Not the ones for your side or the ones for my side. And I’m afraid I have to tell you, the only side that won this election was the Chinese that stole it from us both..
I know you don’t believe what I just said. You think it was a preposterous false rumor. You’re a mathematician. If you want to know the truth, if you want to not be wrong, look into the statistics of the election. The truth is there for anyone to see. Don’t shield your eyes from it because it was your side that won/lost. I dare you to look at the election results with a statistical eye. There you will find the truth staring back at you. I pray that your soul is strong enough to take heed at what I have said.
Your friend,
Ryan
To put it a bit (and only a bit) less polemically than the first comment: what the legislators, Trump lawyers etc have been saying about the 4+ contested states is that while they suspect there was election fraud, there is no need to speculate about fraud to see the following about all the contested states and counties:
1. there was no valid counting and chain of custody for a critically large subset of the votes (enough to plausibly flip the result in each case);
2. novel and highly irregular procedures were followed, invariably to the substantial benefit of Democrats (the extent correlating of course with Zuckerberg funding), and even the brand new pandemic election rules were upended as it concerned e.g. mail-in deadlines, ballot curing, curbside voting, and mail-in “excuses”;
3. scrutineers, genuine audits, integrity of recounts, signature matching and other basic eligibility checks, examination of machines, and preservation of evidence after the election — have all been systematically thwarted (the extent correlating of course with Democratic control of the state and county). Clearly this is very damning if one’s priors on the probability everything was kosher are not the ones dictated by media coverage.
The reasons, dare I say “evidence”, that many people also suspect that Trump actually won are not irrelevant to this. But the scale of the purely procedural irregularity is so far outside the margin of plausibly deniability that it would be reasonable and desirable to see at least one state actually probe the fraud accusations to the point of supporting or refuting them. That is a different game than the excuses, refusals and audits-for-show (as in Georgia) that have happened so far. And a dangerous one for the Democrats, who understand that if Trump establishes fraud in one of the mysteriously paused late night counting centers that drastically raises the credibility of the idea it happened in the other places. The public, if not the media (which will gaslight no matter what the result), would then be forced to contemplate what to do when national-scale election fraud is not a theory but something empirically likely.