The morning of Aug. 8, Lakewood attorney Mario Nicolais studied a pair of complaints filed the night before in Wisconsin, arguing that paperwork filed earlier in the week by Kanye West’s presidential campaign was riddled with problems, including fraudulent entries and signatures from voters who said they were hoodwinked into adding their names.

“In fifteen years practicing election law, I have never seen anything as craven and shameful as the Kanye con job Donald Trump and his sycophants have attempted in Wisconsin,” Nicolais wrote in an article he posted later that afternoon to his website.

In the process, he coined a phrase — “Kanye Con Job” — that would briefly rocket across social media, drawing more than 100,000 readers to his analysis and coalescing anger and eye-rolling amusement around the billionaire rapper’s slipshod attempts to get on the ballot across the country, with the aid of Republican campaign operatives and President Donald Trump’s allies.

Nicolais’ assessment was blunt.

“I have come to two conclusions: not only should Kanye be kept off the ballot, but law enforcement should investigate and prosecute several individuals involved in the effort,” he wrote, before detailing a series of infractions that West’s Wisconsin campaign had allegedly committed.

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Nicolais is no stranger to litigation over ballot access. During his decades handling election law matters, he successfully argued that a Republican congressional candidate had qualified for Colorado’s primary and has run point on statewide ballot measures, where fulfilling petition requirements makes all the difference.

A onetime Republican candidate for the state Senate — he lost a spirited 2014 primary to tea party candidate Tony Sanchez, who went on to lose to Democrat Andy Kerr — Nicolais said he changed his registration to unaffiliated the day before Trump’s inauguration, and makes no bones about his sentiments in the upcoming election.

“I think that Donald Trump is dangerous to our country and to our entire system of government,” he told Colorado Politics.

First and foremost, Nicolais noted in the article he posted online, West’s Wisconsin campaign filed the necessary paperwork just past the 5 p.m. deadline — only seconds late, his advocates argue, though Nicolais points out that the state’s courts have enforced a standard of strict compliance with the rules on other candidates, possibly ending the whole argument right there.

But beyond what he termed that “boneheaded mistake,” Nicolais listed numerous other reasons he believes Wisconsin officials will deny West a spot on the November ballot.

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Never mind, Nicolais wrote, that West’s family and friends have called on the star to seek help for his precarious mental health, or that the last-minute, slap-dash campaign had surely failed to put the rapper on the ballot in enough states to win the presidency. And never mind “that the fundamental assumption – that black voters will vote for a black man based solely on the color of his skin – is a profoundly racist position.”

All that aside, Nicolais wrote, the documents submitted in Wisconsin were “rife with lies, fake signatures and criminal conduct,” casting doubt on more than half of the 2,422 petition signatures, almost certainly leaving West far short of the 2,000 signatures needed to qualify in the battleground state.

More than 1,500 discrepancies included “serious issues of misrepresentation and deceit that may border on criminal activity,” Nicolais wrote, including voters who said they signed the petition only after circulators lied about what they were signing — the papers were “related to voting,” one was told — as well as a raft of fake addresses and a bevy of obviously fake names, from Kanye West to Bernie Sanders and Mickey Mouse.

“Wisconsin voters have been misled, lied to, and cheated,” Nicolais wrote. “Thankfully, Kanye West likely will not be on their ballots in November. However, the man connected to his ‘campaign’ through so many threads will be on the ballot. Come Election Day, Wisconsin voters should remember and make sure to vote the real con man, Donald Trump, out of office.”

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By that evening, #KanyeConJob was the No. 2 trending topic on Twitter in the United States, and it remained in the top 10 through the next day, up there with Mount Rushmore — Trump had reportedly asked South Dakota’s governor to add his visage to the national monument — and the usual assortment of athletes, musicians, gripes and memes.

Fueled by the Lincoln Project — a group of top former Republican campaign consultants who are working to defeat Trump in November — and the revival of a decade-old tweet by Pink, the outspoken singer-songwriter and no fan of Kanye’s integrity, the hashtag Nicolais launched was ricocheting across the globe, peaking at No. 4 in Canada and No. 6 in Australia, eventually making it into the top four Twitter trends worldwide over the weekend.

“We are watching from Canada and think all of this is ridiculous nonsense. For heavens sakes act like adults,” tweeted a user named Hali.

“It speaks volumes to the fact I got so many people paying attention to it on a weekend,” a chuckling Nicolais said in an interview. “I wrote something up on a Saturday morning, and by Sunday people all over the world were talking about it – literally, all over the world.”

This all unfolded at the end of a furious week that saw West qualify for the ballot in Colorado and other states, while coming up short in Florida and getting thrown off the ballot in New Jersey and Illinois.

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“There’s not a lot of reading between the lines you have to do to figure out what they’re doing, and what they’re trying to do — they’re trying to pull people away from Biden,” Nicolais told Colorado Politics. “That’s because there’s a pretty hard ceiling for Trump.”

West, one of Trump’s most prominent supporters until he declared his candidacy on July 4, has admitted as much in recent interviews, declining to disagree with the proposition that his candidacy exists to siphon votes from Biden.

Add to that the involvement of high-level Republicans — including the Trump campaign’s attorney in Wisconsin handling West’s paperwork in the same state — and Nicolais said the scheme’s ineptitude was only outweighed by its brazenness.

“I think most people agree in Colorado, it’s not going to matter that much whether Kanye is on the ballot. Most people agree this state is going to vote for Joe Biden, and the question is whether it’s going to be in double digits or not,” Nicolais said. “Maybe they needed to include a couple states so it wasn’t so blatantly obvious they were just doing it in swing states.

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“But in 2016, Wisconsin was won by 20,000 votes. When it’s just a two-person race, it’s almost a no-hoper for Trump so they’re trying to game this advantage. They’re playing off of some pretty repugnant stereotypes — someone in the Republican Party believes Kanye West is a famous Black man, so Black people are going to vote for him because of that. That should be stomach-turning.”

Early polling shows that if that’s the plan, its architects might be disappointed. According to a national Politico-Morning Consult poll released Aug. 12, West draws support from just 2% of Black voters, though the rapper received 4% of the Hispanic vote and 6% from the youngest cohort of voters.

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