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- Nov 12, 2019
The Wisconsin Supreme Court refuses to take up Trump’s election case.
Election workers work with ballots on Election Day in Milwaukee.
Election workers work with ballots on Election Day in Milwaukee.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Trump campaign’s lawsuit that aimed to invalidate more than 200,000 votes cast in two of the state’s Democratic bastions, closing off yet another legal avenue by which the outgoing president has tried to overturn the results of the general election.
The conservative court’s 4-to-3 vote to decline to take the case puts a stop to one part of a multipronged attempt by President Trump and his supporters to upend the legality of Wisconsin’s entire system of absentee voting, which the Trump campaign had sought to cast as violating state law.
The court’s majority of three liberal justices and one conservative justice wrote that the Wisconsin Supreme Court was not the proper venue for the Trump campaign’s lawsuit and suggested it refile in a lower state court.
Late Thursday the Trump campaign’s Wisconsin lawyer, James Troupis, filed new, separate, lawsuits in Dane County and Milwaukee County, aiming to invalidate votes in the two Democratic bastions covered by the case the Supreme Court declined to hear.
But Mr. Troupis and the Trump campaign are running short on time for any legal action to change the reality of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin. The deadline to exhaust legal challenges to state certifications is Tuesday and the Electoral College is set to meet to formally vote to make Mr. Biden the next president on Dec. 14.
The Trump campaign late Wednesday filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in Milwaukee seeking to undo the result of the election entirely and have Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral College votes be determined by its Republican-controlled state legislature. Two other suits — one in the federal courts and another pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court — are also seeking to challenge the state’s election.
Unlike their claims of electoral malfeasance elsewhere, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies in the state have not argued the presidential election in Wisconsin was marred by fraud.
“I’ve yet to see a credible claim of fraudulent activity during this election,” Dean Knudson, a Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said during the body’s meeting on Tuesday. “The Trump campaign has not made any claims of fraud in this election. These are disputes in matters of law.”
Mr. Troupis, has for the last two weeks argued that the acceptance of in-person absentee ballots by municipal clerks before Election Day violated state law — even though local elections officials were doing so at the direction of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a bipartisan body that oversees the state’s elections.
The Trump lawsuit also argued that municipal clerks should not have been allowed to complete address forms for witnesses to absentee ballots, which the elections commission gave them permission to do. State law requires absentee voters to have witnesses sign their ballot envelopes. It also asked the court to invalidate ballots that were collected by the Madison municipal clerk at October gatherings in city parks, though those events were also blessed by the elections commission.
The Trump campaign only challenged ballots in Milwaukee County and Dane County, which includes Madison, the state capital and home of the flagship University of Wisconsin campus. The two counties are the largest and most Democratic in the state.
The Trump campaign’s lawsuit, if it had been successful, would not necessarily have invalidated ballots cast through the manner it claims were illegal. It simply would have reduced the number of votes from the state’s two most Democratic counties without addressing ballots cast in an identical manner in the state’s other 70 counties.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
— Reid J. Epstein
