The conspiracist in me says that if they don't fix the defect, then it gets thrown out on a 'technicality', which, as we all know from Hollywood, is how criminals avoid being found guilty of their crimes...!
Ha ha, sure. The Trump campaign has an airtight case, and some corrupt Deep State judge dismisses it on a "technicality." I'm sure that's the impression they want to create. The Trump campaign is something like 0-10 on their lawsuits. They fail either for lack of evidence or lack of standing. The point is not to win the election. There's no credible path to victory for Pres. Trump. Joe Biden now has more of the popular vote than Pres. Reagan won in his 1980 "landslide." My impression is that the total number of popular votes at stake in all these lawsuits is probably far below what it would take to even change the picture of the Electoral College, much less swing it to Trump. The Republicans are just trying to erode faith in the kinds of elections they know they can't win: the kind where everyone gets to vote. This is probably so that they can continue to dog a Biden Presidency with the narrative that he cheated to win.
Anything that's not the merits of the case can be considered a "technicality," but in terms of how courts decide things, many of them are extremely important. It's the essence of Due Process and other important rights. In many cases the courts make an important, conscious decision to let an apparently guilty person go free rather than taint Due Process. A defendant may be guilty as sin according to a
laissez-faire view of the evidence, but in order to allow that evidence to appear, for example, the court might have to chip away at an important Fourth Amendment point. It's more important to preserve the sanctity of rights for everyone than to convict any one person by bending the rules. Those are usually the "technicalities" courts speak of when it seems there has been a miscarriage of justice. And of course it's the incentive for law enforcement not to invade those rights in an investigation. Prosecutors will try to get away with as much as they can. In many cases there really are substantive due-process violations, but the defendant is unwilling to take them to trial and chooses a plea agreement.
But there are technicalities and technicalities. Missing a filing deadline or filing a defective complaint, motion, or petition is incompetence on a level that would probably get you fired at a big firm. A filing that's missing required documents is never a good thing. The clerk of the court wields a fair amount of practical power (subject to the Justices, of course), and it's never a good idea to waste their time. Plus, I went to the Michigan Court Rules web site to read how difficult it is to file an appeal. It took me a little over one minute to read the relevant section. I guarantee the judge in the case heard from the clerk what happened.
