Trump asks court to set aside Wisconsin election
MADISON - President Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse Wisconsin’s high court, set aside the state’s presidential election and allow Republicans who control the Legislature to decide how to cast the state’s 10 electoral votes.
It’s the latest in a string of dozens of challenges by the Republican president and his allies to overturn the Nov. 3 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump and his supporters have failed to make headway in the courts.
“This Court is likely the only institution of our government capable of credibly resolving the controversy over this election,” Trump’s legal team told the U.S. Supreme Court in its filing.
Trump’s lawyers asked the court to put the case on a fast track so it can be decided before Congress counts electoral votes on Jan. 6.
The U.S. Supreme Court has already considered a challenge to the results in Wisconsin and other swing states. The high court this month rejected that challenge, which was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and backed by more than 100 Republicans in Congress.
In the latest case, Trump is asking the justices to decide whether more than 50,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee and Dane counties were wrongly counted. Biden carried Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.
Some of the ballots were cast by voters who did not have to provide a copy of their photo ID because they said they were confined to their homes because of age or disability. Trump said there weren’t enough checks to determine whether the voters met that criteria.
He also wants to throw out ballots in cases where clerks filled in the addresses of witnesses on absentee ballot envelopes, as well as absentee ballots returned during events held in Madison parks.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit 4-3 this month, finding that Trump had waited too long to file his lawsuit. The practices he questioned have long been in effect and Trump should have challenged them before the election, the majority ruled.
With his appeal, Trump dropped his most far-reaching argument — that the way Wisconsin officials have conducted early in-person voting for more than a decade is illegal. Even the dissenters on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court didn’t latch onto that claim.
But Trump is asking for more with his appeal than he did in his initial lawsuit.
At first, Trump sought to have 220,000 ballots thrown out in the state’s two most Democratic counties. Now, he’s asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the state’s election entirely and have the Republican-led Legislature decide how to cast Wisconsin’s electoral votes.
Wisconsin’s slate of electors has already cast its votes for Biden.