The Trump campaign’s lawsuits make big claims while providing practically no substantiating evidence.
Attorneys for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers have said that the Trump campaign’s attempt to toss out ballots from two of the state’s most populous counties is “an assault on democracy.”
The Associated Press reports that Evers’s arguments were filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday. The submission follows the Trump campaign’s request that the court invalidate at least 221,000 ballots cast in Milwaukee and Dane counties.
Both counties are among the most populous–and liberal–in Wisconsin. In the 2020 general election, former Vice President Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump by a 2-1 margin.
However, Biden’s margin of victory in Wisconsin was relatively small—he won the state by about 20,682 votes.
The Trump campaign, then, is not asking that the Supreme Court toss votes from any of the state’s 70 other counties, the majority of which the president won.
In the hopes of reaching a quicker decision, campaign attorneys requested that the Supreme Court immediately hear the case on account of its urgency.
However, attorneys for Gov. Evers and the state’s Department of Justice say there is no reason why the Trump campaign should be so privileged as to receive an immediate hearing in front of the Supreme Court.
“President Trump seeks nothing less than to overturn the will of nearly 3.3 million Wisconsin voters,” Evers’s attorneys wrote. “It is a shocking and outrageous assault on our democracy.
“He is simply trying to seize Wisconsin’s electoral votes, even though he lost the statewide election,” they said.
Trump’s lawsuit, says The Associated Press, seeks to discount tens of thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots. The campaign’s complaint provides a variety of reasons as to why such ballots should be discounted.
In that sense, the Trump campaign’s case against Wisconsin is similar to the dozens of other lawsuits the president and his allies have filed in battleground states across the country. It is also similar to other lawsuits insofar as it fails to establish any statute violations, misconduct, or evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Attorneys for Gov. Evers say that, if the Trump campaign had problems with Wisconsin’s voting procedures, it should have filed suit or registered a challenge before the commencement and conclusion of the 2020 elections.
Furthermore, they observed that the campaign’s filing appeared to be blatantly partisan, in that it only targets two of Wisconsin’s most liberal counties.
ABC News notes that this lawsuit is but one of several the campaign has brought against Wisconsin; the president’s attorneys have also demanded, with little explanation, that the state’s electoral results be discounted outright.
In place of citizens’ votes, the campaign wants the state’s Republican-led Legislature to decide how to allocate Wisconsin’s share of the Electoral College ballots.
Jeff Mandell, an attorney with Law Forward, implied that the campaign is grasping at straws.
“Under Wisconsin law, and under federal law, Biden won the most votes in the state of Wisconsin and he’s entitled to—and is going to get—the electoral votes from the state of Wisconsin,” Mandell told ABC. “And that’s what the law provides for pretty clearly. And there’s not an avenue around that.”
Sources
Trump files new case in lawsuit barrage, looking to Wisconsin’s legislature to flip outcome
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