President Donald Trump has now earned the at least 58th post-election court loss for himself and his allies, according to the tally of voting rights lawyer Marc Elias. A Wisconsin federal court has rejected a lawsuit that Trump’s team brought over the election results in the state. Trump sought to have the election outcome’s fate essentially handed to the Wisconsin legislature, who Trump’s legal team apparently wanted to appoint the members of the electoral college for the state regardless of the Wisconsin popular vote outcome. The Wisconsin federal court concluded that Trump failed to prove that Wisconsin authorities had “violated his rights under the Electors Clause” of the Constitution.
🚨🚨BREAKING: Wisconsin Federal Court DISMISSES Trump lawsuit WITH PREJUDICE.
"This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits."
Trump and his allies are now 1-58 in post-election litigation.https://t.co/LfKb2PUIkq
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) December 12, 2020
The court wrote, in part, as follows:
‘In argument, counsel made plain that plaintiff wants the Court to declare the election a failure, with the results discarded, and the door thus opened for the Wisconsin Legislature to appoint Presidential Electors in some fashion other than by following the certified voting results… the Court now… concludes that plaintiff has not proved that defendants violated his rights under the Electors Clause. To the contrary, the record shows Wisconsin’s Presidential Electors are being determined in the very manner directed by the Legislature, as required by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.’
Originally, the Trump team had claimed that officials in Wisconsin had gone too far off course from rules set by the state legislature, therefore supposedly violating the Constitutional demand for the appointment of members of the electoral college to follow state legislative provisions. In reality, the court wrote that the issues that the Trump campaign raised didn’t even cover the way in which Wisconsin appointed its members of the electoral college.
The state, like others around the nation, appoints its electoral college members according to the results of the popular vote, with the winner getting the state’s electoral college members ahead of the college’s meeting to finalize the presidential selection process, which this year is slated for Monday. Trump’s team complained about election administration practices in the state like the usage of drop boxes for absentee ballots, not the actual mechanism by which the members of the electoral college for Wisconsin are appointed.
Critically, the court added that they wouldn’t accept the Trump team’s arguments even if they did accept the premise that election administration complaints fall under complaints about the method of selecting each state’s electoral college members. Officials “acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature,” the court said, and election-related policy guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission “was not a significant or material departure from legislative direction.”
