On Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from the Trump campaign, which sought the invalidation of hundreds of thousands of ballots in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, which lean heavily Democratic. The ballots that the Trump team targeted included, among other categories, absentee ballots submitted without complete address information and absentee ballots from voters who self-identified as “indefinitely confined,” a distinction under Wisconsin law that exempts voters from showing a photo ID to vote. The Trump campaign’s legal challenge wound through the courts in the final stretch before the electoral college vote, which was slated for Monday.
BREAKING:
Wisconsin Supreme Court REJECTS Trump campaign's last-gasp suit there.
"We conclude the Campaign is not entitled to the relief it seeks."
Background, @LawCrimeNews: https://t.co/UsoyX28LVC pic.twitter.com/NJAOqWRdAD
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) December 14, 2020
Essentially, the campaign tried to force a retroactive change to election procedures that could have pushed huge numbers of voters out of the process who’d originally followed directions from authorities. There was no actual voter fraud allegation in the lawsuit, The New York Times explains, although Trump wanted to penalize voters in Wisconsin anyway.
The Monday ruling rejecting the Trump campaign’s anti-democratic election challenge was backed by four of the seven members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, including the court’s three liberal justices and one conservative, Brian Hagedorn. Using a football metaphor, Hagedorn wrote, in part, as follows:
‘Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration. The challenges raised by the Campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began.’
Getting into more specifics, Hagedorn also insisted that Trump’s challenge to ballots from “indefinitely confined” voters is “meritless on its face,” and he concluded that the campaign’s other challenges emerged far too late in the process.
The Saturday ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court emerged shortly after a lower court judge in the state, Stephen Simanek, similarly concluded that election officials had followed the law in their handling of the presidential race in the state. 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.”
Simanek’s ruling came after the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected a Trump campaign attempt to file their lawsuit directly with the state’s highest court, which retorted that the campaign needed to go through the ordinary legal process. After Simanek’s rejection, the case was back before the high court.
A federal court in Wisconsin also recently ruled against the Trump campaign, concluding that election officials in the state “acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature” and that procedure-related guidance from the Wisconsin Election Commission “was not a significant or material departure from legislative direction.” The campaign had alleged that election officials in Wisconsin had veered too far from state legislative directives and thus violated the Constitutional demand for state legislatures to determine the manner of choosing members of the electoral college for each individual state. In fact, the federal court concluded, officials followed right in line with directions from the state legislature in Wisconsin.
