Where To Find The Best Analysis Of This Election Cycle

So far, the single best commentator on the current election cycle and its potential aftermath is the attorney Robert Barnes, who by his account for much of his life has had a sideline of betting on elections. He doesn't have a blog, he doesn't normally write for independent media, and he doesn't have his own YouTube channel.

However, he regularly appears in joint YouTube videos with Richard Barris, an independent pollster and under-the-radar pundit who has a YouTube channel called People's Pundit Daily.

Barnes also appears in joint YouTube videos with a Montreal attorney on a channel called Viva Frei. Before the current election cycle, Barnes also offered insights there into well-publicized cases involving the Covington, KY Catholic schoolboys and General Michael Flynn.

The Viva Frei commentator, as in the video above, also offers independent commentary on the current election cycle without Barnes.

However, for the past several days, Barnes has gone silent, which suggests he's very busy with something. Another attorney who's given good recent commentary on the current state of legal play is Robert Gruler on the YouTube channel of R&R Law Group, a criminal defense practice in Arizona.

There's a very good analyst of the specific legal actions under way in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania by a pseudonymous writer who goes by the name Shipwreckedcrew at the Red State blog, for instance here.

In trying to build my own model of events that can help me put things into place as they occur, I've started with a remark by Robert Barnes on Richard Baris's stream in the days immediately after the election that, although the Trump campaign can insist on recounts and recanvasses in the critical states, the level of manipulation has created a "mess" that can't be rectified by what might be called "point solutions". The problem goes beyond x votes miscounted in precinct y, or x * a votes miscounted in z precincts.

And even if the problem could theoretically be addressed by recanvass or recount, there's no time to accomplish this credibly before the elections can be certified and the electors vote on the president. Thus, while the Trump campaign may make a good-faith effort to accomplish this, the ony effective strategy will be either to have the US Supreme Court (or applicable state supreme courts) declare enough state elections invalid to result in neither presidential candidate receiving an electoral majority, with the outcome resolved in the House of Representatives -- or to have the state legislatures involved name their own slates of electors, as opposed to the slate elected in the invalid elections.

I'll have more to say on this view of the state of play as events develop.