Election workers, right, verify ballots as recount observers, left, watch during a Milwaukee hand recount of presidential votes at the Wisconsin Center, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee.Nam Y. Huh/The Associated Press
Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential election results on Sunday, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in the key battleground state. Mr. Trump vowed to challenge the outcome in court even before the recount concluded.
Dane County, where the state capital of Madison is located, was the last county to finish its recount, reporting a 45-vote gain for Mr. Trump. Milwaukee County, the state’s other big and overwhelmingly liberal county targeted in a recount for which the Trump campaign paid US$3-million, reported its results Friday, a 132-vote gain for Mr. Biden.
Taken together, the two counties barely budged Mr. Biden’s winning margin of about 20,600 votes, giving the winner a net gain of 87 votes.
“As we have said, the recount only served to reaffirm Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin,” Danielle Melfi, who led the Biden campaign in Wisconsin, said in a statement.
With no precedent for overturning a result as large as Mr. Biden’s, Mr. Trump was widely expected to head to court once the recount was finished. His campaign challenged thousands of absentee ballots during the recount, and even before it was complete, Mr. Trump tweeted that he would sue.
“The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Saturday. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”
Trump campaign officials didn’t immediately respond to Associated Press requests for comment on Sunday.
The deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday. Certification is done by the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, which is bipartisan.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against state election officials seeking to block certification of the results. It makes many of the claims Mr. Trump is expected to make. Governor Tony Evers’ attorneys have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the suit. Mr. Evers, a Democrat, said the complaint is a “mishmash of legal distortions” that uses factual misrepresentations in an attempt to take voting rights away from millions of Wisconsin residents.
Another suit filed over the weekend by Wisconsin resident Dean Mueller argues that ballots placed in drop boxes are illegal and must not be counted.
Mr. Trump’s attorneys have complained about absentee ballots where voters identified themselves as “indefinitely confined,” allowing them to cast an absentee ballot without showing a photo ID; ballots that have a certification envelope with two different ink colours, indicating a poll worker may have helped complete it; and absentee ballots that don’t have a separate written record for its request, such as in-person absentee ballots.
Election officials in the two counties counted those ballots during the recount, but marked them as exhibits at the request of the Trump campaign.
The Trump campaign has already failed elsewhere in court without proof of widespread fraud, which experts widely agree doesn’t exist. Trump legal challenges have failed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.