Thanks for the tip. It was not the switch but in that circuit. A friend of a friend is was a Toyota Technician. He suggested it might be a short in the stop light circuit that blew the fuse. Seems that the design of the harness takes the wiring into the trunk via the hinge on the driver's side. He suggested looking there, apparently a pretty common problem. I looked and found 3 wires in the hinge area that had bare spots on them. It looks like the repeated bending of the wires has caused a brittleness and the insulation had fallen off. I taped them up, changed the fuse and problem solved.
Linear Mode
