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If you bother to read the clear and concise decision from Justice Hagedorn, and slog through the muck of the 3 dissenting conservatives, you will quickly arrive at the conclusion that Hagedorn's reasoning is correct, and that the conservatives show exactly why.
Hagedorn, and the majority rely primarily on laches, which is a fancy lawyer way of saying that your complaint was too late. Hagedorn makes this case quite clearly, as every practice cited by the republicans as illegal have been in use for a very long time.
The time to complain about them was before the election, so that they could be decided before people voted, and communicated to the voting populace. Makes perfect sense.
The conservatives all wrote dissents, and all joined each others dissents, which, ok, a bit weird...
The conservatives all wrote dissents, and all joined each others dissents, which, ok, a bit weird...
but they collectively prove Hagedorn's point exactly. The crux of their argument is that the law must be followed exactly, and if the WEC or someone else gave bad advice, that's too bad. We still get to throw out a quarter million votes.
The reason we have laches is because of this. There will always be issues with people following election law perfectly, especially as the right continues to make the law more complicated in order to make voting more difficult. In any given election, a court could easily pick and
choose any number of technical violations to reach the conclusion they desire. Remember, this challenge was only to Dane and Milwaukee counties, which should trigger alarm bells for you. This was targeted, and targeted technical defects should never overturn an election.
The dissenters here are of course beyond shame, but they should feel deep shame, and the fact that they are one judge away from actually picking a winner by throwing out perfectly fine ballots based on meaningless technicalities is beyond the pale.
I would also urge you to read Hagedorn's concurrence, which was written to combat the accusation that envoking laches dodged important issues on the merits. It's clear that while the complaints were not timely, they were also asinine.
