President Donald Trump’s flailing effort to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory suffered yet another body blow on Monday as the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected his campaign’s legal challenge in the key battleground state.
Finding Trump’s claim of over 220,000 unlawfully cast ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties—which Biden carried by margins of 52.6 and 39.9 points respectively—”meritless on its face,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote (pdf) for the 4-3 majority that “striking these votes now—after the election, and in only two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties when the disputed practices were followed by hundreds of thousands of absentee voters statewide—would be an extraordinary step for this court to take.”
BREAKING: In advance of the meeting on the Electoral College, the Wisconsin Supreme Court REJECTS Trump appeal of his recount loss.
ALL SIGNIFICANT POST-ELECTION CASES HAVE NOW BEEN DECIDED.
Trump and his allies are 1-59 in post-election litigation.https://t.co/YXiMPxxb6w
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 14, 2020
“The [Trump] campaign’s delay in raising these issues was unreasonable in the extreme, and the resulting prejudice to the election officials, other candidates, voters of the affected counties, and to voters statewide, is obvious and immense,” Hagedorn wrote. The justice continued:
Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration. The challenges raised by the [Trump] 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.
Election claims of this type must be brought expeditiously. The campaign waited until after the election to raise selective challenges that could have been raised long before the election. We conclude the challenge to indefinitely confined voter ballots is without merit does not succeed in its effort to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.
In her dissent, Chief Justice Patience Drake Roggensack sided with Trump and asserted that “it is critical that the public perceive that the election was fairly conducted.”
However, Roggensack did not address the reasons why millions of Americans believe the election was “rigged” or “stolen,” which include incessant lies and disinformation from not only right-wing media and pundits but from prominent Republicans including the president himself.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports Monday’s loss was the fourth time in the past two weeks that the state justices ruled against the president’s campaign, which spent $3 millon on a recount in Dane and Milwaukee counties that ended with Biden enjoying an even larger lead than before.
Trump has now lost all but one of his 60 legal challenges in his increasingly desperate bid to reverse the will of the American people—over seven million more of whom voted for Biden than for him. Biden also won the Electoral College by 74 votes, 306-232. Trump, who defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by the exact same Electoral College score in 2016, called his own margin of victory a “landslide” at the time.
The president’s latest defeat came as members of the Electoral College were meeting or preparing to meet Monday in state capitals nationwide to cast their ballots to officially elect Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
