Trump Campaign to File Lawsuit in Wisconsin, Claiming 220,000 Absentee Ballots Illegally Cast
The Trump campaign is set to file a lawsuit Tuesday morning in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court alleging that abuse of absentee voting affected 220,000 ballots in the battleground state that President-elect Joe Biden won.
The campaign makes several claims of election officials intentionally breaking the law, resulting in illegal votes being cast and counted. According to the lawsuit, Wisconsin Election Commission officials as well as the city clerks of Milwaukee and Madison “willfully disregarded the current statute and made conscious efforts to circumvent Wisconsin election law,” causing a substantial number of votes to be counted that were cast “well outside of the bounds of Wisconsin law.”
One such instance involves election officials accepting ballots without the required absentee ballot request forms on file, as Wisconsin law mandates, the campaign claims. Ballots that were cast without an absentee ballot application on file should be challenged, the campaign said.
The campaign also claims that municipal clerks were “illegally altering ballot envelopes themselves” and fixing errors such as missing addresses.
Election officials also allowed voters to flout voter ID laws, the lawsuit alleges, by allowing them to vote absentee even though they were not “indefinitely confined,” meaning they are “physically ill, infirm, elderly or disabled,” the group for which Wisconsin reserves absentee voting.
Finally, the lawsuit claims the city of Madison allowed “unlawful polling locations at over 200 locations throughout the city’s Democracy in the Park voting events,” making ballots cast at those locations illegal. The Biden campaign also encouraged and advertised those events, according to the campaign.
The head of the Trump campaign’s Wisconsin legal team, former Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Jim Troupis, admitted that Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes likely will not change the overall outcome of the election but said the campaign also sees long-term benefits of challenging the election process in the state.
“Exposing exactly how the election processes were abused in Wisconsin holds enormous value for this election beyond a victory for President Trump, but the fact is, our state’s electoral votes likely won’t change the overall outcome,” Troupis said. “Regardless, we’re demonstrating that the results of this election unequivocally ought to be questioned.”
The campaign’s suit comes after Wisconsin finished a partial recount of the vote tally on Sunday, which added 87 votes to Biden’s lead in the state. Democratic Governor Tony Evers certified the election results Monday night, a day before the deadline to do so.
Hours earlier Arizona also certified its election results, affirming Biden as the first Democrat to be victorious in the state since 1996.
Trump has so far refused to concede since the election, claiming that widespread fraud occurred with large numbers of mail ballots sufficient to overturn his victory.
