The Wisconsin state Supreme Court, where conservatives currently hold a slim 4-3 majority, has declined to take up a challenge that the Trump campaign brought before the court against the election results in the state. A majority of the justices concluded that state law demanded that the Trump campaign file a lower-court challenge before state Supreme Court consideration of the matter, although as The Washington Post explains, the Trump campaign had “argued the matter was of such pressing and urgent concern that it should be considered immediately by the high court.” The court did not agree — Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, insisted that “[following] the law governing challenges to election results is no threat to the rule of law.”
🚨🚨BREAKING: Wisconsin Supreme Court DENIES Trump petition to bring original action to challenge the results of the recount in state Supreme Court.
Trump and his allies are 1-41 in court.https://t.co/7xFoB99MvN
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 3, 2020
In their rejected challenge, the Trump campaign sought the invalidation of a whopping 220,000 ballots in the state, alleging mishandling of the process by election authorities. The Trump campaign’s attempted rush to the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin seems to highlight their desperation. Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer who has worked on a slew of election-related cases in the wake of Election Day, said on Twitter after the Thursday ruling from the Wisconsin state Supreme Court that Trump and his allies had now lost in post-election litigation a whopping 41 times and counting. There is no conspiracy across the American judicial system that ensnares conservative and liberal judges in which fraud perpetrators get a free pass. Trump and his allies simply do not have a meaningful case in support of their claims that systematic fraud plagued the recent presidential election across the country.
In Wisconsin, conservative Justice Hagedorn explained, in part:
‘Even if this court has constitutional authority to hear the case straightaway, notwithstanding the statutory text, the briefing reveals important factual disputes that are best managed by a circuit court. The parties clearly disagree on some basic factual issues, supported at times by competing affidavits. I do not know how we could address all the legal issues raised in the petition without sorting through these matters, a task we are neither well-positioned nor institutionally designed to do.’
Wisconsin recently concluded an official recount in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which lean heavily Democratic. The Trump campaign funded this recount, as state law demanded, and the effort confirmed Biden’s win in the state, which has since been officially certified by state authorities. Symbolizing their desperation, at a recent so-called hearing in Arizona about supposed election fraud in the state, prominent Trump ally Rudy Giuliani suggested that officials who sign onto certifications of supposedly false results could be committing a crime via certifying supposedly false statements. There’s no meaningful evidence for this claim, at all.
