Trump/Pence sue Evers over election declaration

Posted at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, December 1, 2020

By Benjamin Yount

Center Square News Service

MADISON - President Donald Trump made good Tuesday on his promise to sue over Wisconsin’s election results, but the fate of his lawsuit is unclear.

The president’s campaign is asking a judge to toss out more than 220,000 votes because some voters cast their ballots early, others claimed to be indefinitely confined, some did not fully fill out their ballot, and others because voters turned in absentee ballots in a Madison park.

The president’s lawsuit, filed by attorneys James Troupis of Cross Plains and R. George Burnett of Green Bay, also claims the Wisconsin Elections Commission shortchanged his opportunity to dispute the recently completed recount in Milwaukee and Dane counties.

“With Governor [Tony] Evers’ premature certification, he is saying the President of the United States has no right to go to court in order to have illegal ballots examined,” Trump’s lead attorney in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, told Fox News. “He’s not saying we have a frivolous lawsuit, he is saying we have no right to judicial review. That’s another level of bad."

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul immediately dismissed the allegations made in the president's lawsuit.

“This case seeks to disenfranchise over 200,000 Wisconsinites. It doesn’t claim that a single one of those voters was ineligible to vote in Wisconsin,” Kaul said on Twitter after the president’s lawyers filed their case with the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. “Instead, it seeks to establish a two-tiered system for votes cast in the presidential election, with citizens from two of our counties subject to disenfranchisement under much stricter rules than citizens in the rest of the state. And it seeks to disenfranchise these voters based on post-election interpretations of the law that voters obviously couldn’t have known about when they cast their ballots.”

Trump challenged ballots only from Milwaukee and Dane counties in his recount request, and he challenges those same counties in his lawsuit. Milwaukee and Dane counties happen to be the state’s largest as well as the state’s most Democratic, and home to most of Wisconsin’s people of color.

Local Democratic leaders in both counties have accused the president and his team of racism.

The lawsuit comes as Wisconsin’s Elections Commission continues to squabble among itself.

Republican Commissioner Dean Knudson on Tuesday said Commission chairwoman Ann Jacobs should resign for declaring Joe Biden the winner of Wisconsin’s presidential race before the Commission could certify the state’s votes.

Jacobs said what she did Monday was legal.

The Commission, which is split between three Republican commissioners and three Democratic commissioners, has argued over the November 2020 election for most of the year.