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Wisconsin confirms Joe Biden as winner following recount

Election officials count absentee ballots on Nov. 4, 2020, in Milwaukee. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Joe Biden’s victory in battleground Wisconsin was confirmed Monday following a partial recount that only added to his 20,600-vote margin over President Donald Trump, who has promised to file a lawsuit seeking to undo the results.

Confirmation of the results by the Democratic chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission started a five-day window for Trump to file a lawsuit. Trump on Saturday promised to file a lawsuit either on Monday or Tuesday, a longshot attempt to overturn the results by disqualifying as many as 238,000 ballots. Trump’s attorneys have alleged without evidence that there was widespread fraud and illegal activity.

Biden’s campaign has said the recount showed that Biden won Wisconsin decisively and there was no fraud. Even if Trump were successful in Wisconsin, the state’s 10 Electoral College votes would not be enough to undo Biden’s overall victory.

“There’s no basis at all for any assertion that there was widespread fraud that would have affected the results,” Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said in a statement Monday. He noted that Trump’s recount targeted only the state’s two most populous counties where the majority of Black people live.

“I have every confidence that this disgraceful Jim Crow strategy for mass disenfranchisement of voters will fail,” Kaul said. “An election isn’t a game of gotcha.”

State law
gives the power to confirm the election results to the chair of the
bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. The position rotates between
Republicans and Democrats and is currently held by Ann Jacobs, a
Democrat. She signed the canvass statement showing Biden as the winner
over objections from Republicans who wanted to wait until after legal
challenges were exhausted.

In a possible nod to the threatened
litigation, the commission called Jacobs’ action a “determination,”
rather than certification, even though earlier this year and in prior
elections it has called such action certification.

Republican
elections commissioner Bob Spindell said final certification would not
take place until after Trump’s lawsuit plays out.

Trump’s legal
challenges have failed in other battleground states, including Arizona,
Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Two lawsuits from others
seeking to disqualify ballots in Wisconsin were filed last week with the
Wisconsin Supreme Court, which has not taken action.

Trump paid
$3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest
Democratic counties in Wisconsin, but the recount ended up increasing
Biden’s lead by 87 votes. Biden won statewide by nearly 20,700 votes.

Trump,
during the recount, sought to have ballots discarded where election
clerks filled in missing address information on the certification
envelope where the ballot is inserted. The state elections commission
told clerks before the election that they could fill in missing
information on the absentee ballot envelopes, a practice that has been
in place for at least the past 11 elections and that no court has ever
ruled illegal.

Trump also challenged any absentee ballot where a
voter declared themselves to be “indefinitely confined” under the law, a
designation that increased from about 57,000 in 2016 to nearly 216,000
this year due to the pandemic. Such a declaration exempts the voter from
having to show a photo identification to cast a ballot, which Trump
attorney Christ Troupis called “an open invitation for fraud and abuse.”
The conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court this spring ruled
that it is up to individual voters to determine whether they are
indefinitely confined, in line with guidance from the state elections
commission.

Trump also sought to discard any absentee ballot where
there was not a written application on file and all absentee ballots
cast in-person during the two weeks before Election Day.

People
who vote in-person early fill out a certification envelope that they
then place their ballot in and that envelope serves as the written
record. But the vast majority of absentee requests these days are made
online, with a voter’s name entered into an electronic log with no paper
record.

Disqualifying all of the ballots in Milwaukee and Dane
counties that Trump identified during the recount would result in more
than 238,000 votes not counting, according to an analysis by the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The conservative Wisconsin Voters
Alliance sued last week seeking to block certification of the results
and give the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to appoint
presidential electors to cast the state’s 10 Electoral College votes.
Another lawsuit filed over the weekend by Wisconsin resident Dean
Mueller argues that ballots placed in drop boxes are illegal and must
not be counted.