Today, Wisconsin’s presidential electors met to formally award the state’s ten electoral college votes to President-Elect Joe Biden.
It was one of the final steps in an election season marked by numerous legal challenges and multi-million dollar recounts in two of the state’s most populous — and liberal — counties.
Governor Tony Evers served as the Chair of today’s meeting and presided over the certification process.
“It is my distinct honor to announce that Wisconsin casts its ten electoral votes for President of the United States of America to Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and, for Vice President of the United States of America, ten electoral votes for Kamala D. Harris. We made it,” Evers told the ten electors.
The vote came just an hour after the Wisconsin Supreme Court shot down a major challenge from the Trump administration.
The suit, filed two weeks ago, sought to overturn more than 220,000 Dane and Milwaukee county ballots. Trump campaign attorneys argued that certain types of absentee ballots — most notably those cast early and in-person and those cast by indefinitely confined voters — were invalid.
Most of those absentee voting provisions were actually authored by Republicans. And Trump previously expressed no concerns about allowing those votes when he sailed to victory in the Badger state in 2016.
The Trump campaign was also looking to toss out ballots submitted during Democracy in the Park. Those two events, which did not distribute any ballots, allowed Madison voters to return their absentee ballots in-person, rather than mailing them back.
The court split 4-3 along political lines, with Justice Brian Hagedorn once again taking the position of the high-court’s lone swing vote.
In their decision, the four justices said that Trump’s challenge to indefinitely confined voters lacked merit and the three other absentee ballot challenges were filed too late in the game to be considered.
“Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration,” the typically-conservative Hagedorn wrote in the majority opinion.
“The challenges raised by the Campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began.”
Writing in the dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack argued that — by not addressing the legality of all four of the challenges — the majority kicked the can down the road to be determined in a future election.
“The majority does not bother addressing what the boards of canvassers did or should have done, and instead, four members of this court throw the cloak of (timing) over numerous problems that will be repeated again and again, until this court has the courage to correct them,” Roggensack wrote.
Today’s ruling is the latest in a string of defeats dealt to the Trump campaign. Both in federal and state-level courts, the campaign has lost nearly all of its legal efforts to overturn the election results.
But, Republicans are still seeking to overturn the election. Earlier today, Wisconsin’s conservatives put forward their own slate of presidential electors to cast imaginary votes for President Trump.
According to the Wisconsin Republican party, the pseudo-electors met in a last ditch effort to keep the election open as more legal challenges make their way through federal court.
Wisconsin’s official electors seemed unfazed by the GOP’s challenges to their authority, as they joked and made small talk during their meeting.
“I already had somebody ask me for an electoral college T-shirt,” Evers joked to the electors.
The results of the vote from Wisconsin’s Electoral College will now be sent to the United States Congress, where the country’s electoral votes will be approved on January 6th and Biden’s win will be officially declared.
(PHOTO: Chali Pittman)
