Photo by Connor Betts on Unsplash.
The lawsuit from Trump’s legal team asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes in Milwaukee and Dane County.
It aims to garner Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes for President Trump, in a state president-elect Joe Biden won by more than 20,000 votes.
The lawsuit, filed by former Dane County judge and Cross Plains attorney Jim Troupis and Green Bay lawyer R George Burnett, seeks to throw out more than 220,000 votes in Dane and Milwaukee County.
It objects to four categories of ballots cast in order to do so.
The lawsuit seeks to throw out roughly 170,000 ballots cast through in-person absentee voting/early voting before Election Day. Voters voted by absentee ballot in all of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, yet the suit seeks to only throw out ballots in Dane and Milwaukee Counties.
It also seeks to exclude 5,500 ballots in which local clerks filled in missing address information. Local clerks did so under guidance handed down from the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
It also seeks to exclude over 28,000 ballots cast by voters who said they are indefinitely confined. Currently, voters who say they are indefinitely confined do not have to prove they cannot get to the polls, and do not have to show photo identification in order to vote. The practice was also in place and used during the 2016 presidential election.
22,519 voters in Dane County self-certified as being indefinitely confined. But more than 215,000 voters – in all counties of the state – said they were indefinitely confined this election.
Finally, the lawsuit seeks to throw out ballots returned during the City of Madison’s Democracy in the Park events, during which voters could return their absentee ballots instead of sending them through the mail. At the time, right wing commentators accused the event of ballot harvesting. But no ballots were issued during the two events, but merely provided voter registration and “human dropboxes” to return absentee ballots that had been sent to voters in the mail.
Those four objections were noted but rejected by the Dane County Board of Canvassers during the recount process, paving the way for this litigation.
On Sunday, as the recount wrapped up, Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell mused whether that was an unconstitutional inequality in protection of the vote.
“A lot of these objections would be true in Waukesha, Door and Ashland,” he said. “And yet, only Dane and Milwaukee are being targeted for that objection, which to me is clearly an equal protection violation.”
Yesterday, Wisconsin Election Commission chair Ann Jacobs, officially certified the results of the 2020 election.
This could only be done after the recount had been completed, but Republican members of the commission wanted to wait longer.
In a meeting of the Elections Commission today, Commissioner Dean Knudson, a Republican, called for the resignation of Democratic Chairwoman Jacobs for certifying the results ahead of their meeting.
But, that is standard practice. Meagan Wolfe, the Elections Commission administrator, says that the full commission has never voted on the decision to certify.
The State Supreme Court has asked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers to respond to the lawsuit by 8:30 p.m. tonight, an unusually tight timeframe.The Supreme Court, which has 4 conservative justices and 3 liberal justices, has not yet said whether it will take the case.
Yet another lawsuit calling to change the results of the election was filed today. This lawsuit, baselessly citing election fraud, demands Governor Evers declare Trump the winner of Wisconsin. It filed by the chairman of the La Crosse County GOP party chairman and failed Republican congressional candidate Derrick Van Orden, although Van Orden said earlier today on Twitter that he is not involved with the lawsuit, and his name is being used without his permission.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, filed their own lawsuit last Tuesday asking the Republican-controlled state legislature to overturn the results of the election and cast the state’s votes in the electoral college for Donald Trump. Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, a Republican from Kaukauna, said on Twitter – in a GIF – that the legislature will not do so.
Governor Evers has not responded to the lawsuit at time of writing. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, said in a statement earlier today that the lawsuit was attempting to disenfranchise voters based on where they live.
Wisconsin is required by state law to certify their results today. The electoral college votes on December 14th.
