There are plenty of fraud allegations out there, plenty to keep even a sizable legal team busy. But this much seems clear: Any pathway to President Donald Trump’s reelection must include a win in Pennsylvania.

Or must it?

National Review’s Andrew McCarthy thinks so. He calls the Keystone State “ground zero.”

“In any event,” McCarthy writes, “it is sensible that Pennsylvania is the center of the action. First, Trump needs the Commonwealth — if he doesn’t flip it, there is nothing else to discuss. Second, as we’ve been covering here at NR since mid October, there is already a live Supreme Court case challenging Pennsylvania’s election law, relating to whether the three-day extension for receiving ballots (i.e., through close of business last Friday, November 6) is constitutional. Finally, the Keystone State is where the Trump camp believes it can make a strong case of fraud.”

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, says that because Philadelphia’s Republican poll watchers weren’t allowed to monitor the vote counting there, more than 300,000 ballots are in dispute. In addition, as McCarthy points out, there are 300,000 more votes at issue in Pittsburgh for the same reasons. “Giuliani,” he says, “further posits a motive: He notes that late on the night of the election, President Trump appeared to be ahead by over 700,000 votes. So the theory is that what Rudy called the ‘decrepit Democratic machine’ produced fraudulent ballots to erase the deficit and put Biden ahead.”

All this is good, sound, impenetrable McCarthian logic, and far be it from us to lock horns with him (or Rudy) on matters of legal strategy. But we’ll bite on the math of McCarthy’s first point: that if the president can’t flip Pennsylvania, he can’t win. Not true. Not true at all. In fact, we don’t even want Pennsylvania, for reasons we’ll explain in a moment.

First, we should start by putting the Trump electoral count at 232, because that’s where it’ll be when North Carolina and Alaska — two states whose outcome no one is seriously disputing — finally go into the Trump column where they’ve belonged since election night. From 232, then, a flip of three states with razor-thin margins — Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), and Georgia (16) — would put the president at 269 electoral votes … a splendiferous tie with the media’s “President-elect” Joe Biden.

We say splendiferous because a 269-269 tie would go to President Trump. How? Our constitutional system says that in the event of an electoral tie, the House of Representatives picks the president and the Senate picks the veep.

But Andrews, you knucklehead, the House is firmly in Democrat hands!

And indeed it is. But the House doesn’t get to cast its decisive votes by individual member. Instead, it must cast them by state delegation — one vote per glorious state. So California’s 40-something Democrats will carry the exact same voting weight as Wyoming’s one Republican rep, and New York’s 20-something the same as Montana’s one. And given that the GOP controlled more state delegations going into last Tuesday’s election, and given that they didn’t lose a single House seat, it’s safe to say that the Republicans still have the numbers to return President Trump for a second term.

All Rudy needs to do is make the fraud case in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. And all we need to do is stock up on beer, brats, burgers, and plywood paneling.

Like we said, splendiferous.

The bottom line? The Trump team may or may not be able to change this electoral outcome, but for the sake of future elections, EVERY instance of fraud in this election, particularly the Democrats’ massive bulk-mail-ballot fraud, must be exposed now. If not, those fraudulent methods WILL become their standard for stealing elections in 2022 and beyond.