Wisconsin Hands 56th Loss To Trump & Allies With Stern Rejection

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Wisconsin Judge Stephen Simanek, who the state Supreme Court appointed to handle a challenge from the Trump team, has newly rejected a Trump campaign lawsuit in which the president’s team was seeking to overturn the presidential election results in Wisconsin, where Biden won. Simanek wrote that “the court is satisfied the rules and guidelines applied in each of the disputed areas are reasonable, and a correct interpretation of the underlying early absentee voting laws,” and thus, “the certification of the results of the 2020 Wisconsin presidential election, after the Dane County and Milwaukee County recounts, is affirmed.” The Trump campaign itself paid for those Dane and Milwaukee County recounts, which cost about $3 million and confirmed Biden’s win.

Simanek also concluded that there is “no credible evidence of misconduct or wide-scale fraud,” which, besides reflecting the conclusions of officials as high-ranking as Attorney General Bill Barr, throws cold water on one of the Trump team’s fundamental arguments. The president and his allies have consistently claimed that the presidential election was plagued by nationwide fraud, which is supposedly responsible for Biden’s victory — but the legitimate evidence for this claim simply isn’t there.

Simanek’s ruling against Trump emerged shortly after the Wisconsin state Supreme Court rejected a similar Trump campaign challenge to the election results. A majority of the Justices concluded that the campaign should have started with the circuit court system. Following that Wisconsin Supreme Court rejection, the Trump legal team filed its challenge with the circuit court system in the state, which culminated in this new failure. According to the tally of voting rights lawyer Marc Elias, the failure of Trump’s circuit court challenge to the Wisconsin election results is the at least 56th post-election court loss for Trump and his allies. Elias counts a meager one victory — and these numbers don’t exactly indicate a well-supported case against the election results, to say the least.

Wisconsin is the subject of another separate court challenge that the state Attorney General of Texas filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has exclusive jurisdiction over court fights between states. Trump’s own legal team and a slew of Republican-led states have joined that case in support of Texas’s position, while 22 state and territory Attorney Generals and the Attorney General for Washington, D.C., have joined the case in opposition, besides the opposition from the targeted states themselves.

Texas’s side of the case alleges that the targeted states unconstitutionally changed their respective election laws because changes went through state courts and officials other than members of formal legislative bodies, but Texas’s opponents tore apart this argument in a recently filed response. In short, they’ve explained that there’s no legitimate basis for confining substantive election-related policy-making to formal legislative bodies — what substantive role would state courts even have in election-related decision-making, under Texas’s theory? Courts are supposed to check the other branches of government.