On Tuesday, Dec. 1, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin targeting more than 200,000 votes in two counties containing the majority of the state’s Black residents.
After a partial recount, for which the Trump campaign paid $3 million, the state-certified the results for President-Elect Joe Biden on Monday.
The new lawsuit, filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, seeks to overturn the state’s election results by targeting 221,323 votes cast in Milwaukee and Dane Counties, two regions where much of the state’s Black population resides.
The two counties were also targeted by the requested recount, which ultimately yielded 87 more votes for Biden after it was completed.
Biden won the state by a margin of 20,682 votes after the recount.
Legal experts and James Troupis, a member of the Trump campaign, have admitted the suit likely will not impact the results of the election. All six swing states President Trump has contested have certified the results in favor of Biden.
The largest share of the targeted votes, some 170,000, are absentee ballots, while the rest of the votes the campaign wants tossed out are comprised of ballots missing a witness address, those submitted by people who identified as “indefinitely confined” and those returned during the Democracy in the Park event hosted by the city of Madison. The suit describes the event as having created “unlawful polling locations.”
The suit does not allege voter fraud, but instead claims the votes were cast in violation of state law because voters who filed the in-person absentee ballots did not have to submit a separate written application.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that voters have been allowed to sign a form on the ballot envelope, which serves as a ballot application, and certifies that they have filled out the ballot for over a decade.
The campaign asks justices to void Governor Tony Evers’ certification of Biden’s win.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul called the move a “Jim Crow strategy” in a statement on Monday before the suit was filed.
It’s clear that President Trump and his representatives used the recount to seek after-the-election changes to the rules. Those changes would result in tens of thousands of votes, if not more, being thrown out — and the president’s representatives have only sought to have those changes applied to votes cast in our two most populous counties, in which the majority of Black Wisconsinites live,” Kaul said.
“I have every confidence that this disgraceful Jim Crow strategy for mass disenfranchisement of voters will fail.”
