ARIZONA, WISCONSIN CERTIFY BIDEN’S WINS
Officials in battleground states formalize results, closing off another path for president
Arizona and Wisconsin on Monday certified President-elect Joe Biden as the winner in their presidential elections, formalizing his victory in two additional battleground states as President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the election continued to fall short.
Such certifications would be an afterthought in any other year. But in a political environment where Trump is claiming sweeping voter fraud, the results have closed off yet another path to victory for him.
Although Trump urged his Republican allies to push to block the certification of results or to overturn them in battleground states won by Biden, the proceedings Monday were staid affairs.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, formalized her state’s results while sitting at a long table with three Republicans who signed the election documents: Gov. Doug Ducey; the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich; and the chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Robert M. Brutinel.
Ann Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, signed a document during a three-minute video conference in which she narrated herself certifying Biden’s victory.
“I am now signing it as the official state determination of the results of the Nov. 3, 2020, election and the canvass,” Jacobs said before holding the document up to the camera. Later Monday afternoon, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, a Democrat, announced that he had signed the state’s Certificate of Ascertainment appointing Biden’s slate of electors to represent Wisconsin at the Electoral College.
Trump, buoyed by his legal team and supporters in the conservative news media, has held out hope that he could somehow prevail in Wisconsin and Arizona, as well as Georgia, where Republican officials on Monday firmly refused to challenge Biden’s victory there. In all three states, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, the other two states that flipped from voting for Trump in 2016 to Biden this year, the Trump campaign has sought to undermine the results through legal and public relations efforts aimed at delivering the president Electoral College votes.
But as has been the case elsewhere, elections officials from both parties in Arizona and Wisconsin declined to undercut their state laws to overturn the popular vote in their states.
“We do elections well in Arizona,” Ducey said Monday as he signed documents certifying Biden’s Arizona victory and awarding him the state’s 11 Electoral College votes. “The system is strong.”
In Wisconsin, Jacobs chose to certify Biden’s win there one day before the state’s Dec. 1 deadline to do so.
Jacobs’ certification followed the conclusion of recounts, requested and subsidized with $3 million from Trump’s campaign, in Dane and Milwaukee counties that found Biden had added
87 votes to his statewide margin.
Jacobs, a Democrat from Milwaukee, said that certifying the result of the presidential election came at her discretion and that she expected the move to kickstart legal challenges from the Trump campaign.
“The power to do this is vested solely in the chair,” Jacobs said in an interview Monday.
All states must exhaust legal challenges by Dec. 8. Electoral College delegates will meet in their states on Dec. 14, sending the results to Congress, which is scheduled to resolve any final disputes and certify the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.
Unlike in other states where the Trump campaign has claimed, without producing any evidence, that widespread fraud led to Biden’s victories, Trump’s legal strategy in Wisconsin is predicated on an effort to throw out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots on what amounts to a technicality.
The Trump campaign has argued in its recount petition that all ballots cast at in-person absentee voting sites before Election Day should be disqualified. The campaign claimed incorrectly that those absentee ballots had been issued without each voter submitting a written application requesting the ballot, but the top line of the absentee ballot applications that voters filled out at early voting sites read: “official absentee ballot application/certification.”
That argument would throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots across Wisconsin, including those cast by prominent Trump supporters, such as several state legislators and a top lawyer for the president in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
On Twitter on Monday, Trump called for Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, to “overrule” Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state. The president also claimed that there had been “total election corruption” in Arizona. The Trump campaign has yet to identify any systemic voter fraud in its court challenges.