MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential results on Sunday, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in the key battleground state. Trump vowed to challenge the outcome in court even before the recount concluded.
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Dane County was the second and last county to finish its recount, reporting a 45-vote gain for Trump. Milwaukee County, the state’s other big and overwhelmingly liberal county targeted in a recount that Trump paid $3 million for, reported its results Friday, a 132-vote gain for Biden.
Taken together, the two counties barely budged 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 Biden’s campaign in Wisconsin, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
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, 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,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”
Trump campaign officials didn’t immediately respond to AP 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 Trump is expected to make. Gov. Tony Evers’ attorneys have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the suit. 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.
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 colors, 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.
Elections are NOT rigged in America. The votes count. Democracy is worth fighting for. Only crazed trump keeps yelling ‘smoke!’ when there is no fire. Would you keep your shul’s director if he kept yelling ‘fraud’ for a month? NO. You’d throw him into the street.
Trump paid $22,727 for each of the 132 votes Biden picked up.
That was certainly $3 million well spent by the Trump campaign since it added $3 million to the Wisconsin economy and even gave Joe Biden additional votes.
This Trump effort to overturn the election is a farce but it must be done to keep the delusional loser happy.
132 votes? That sort of indicates paying for recounts in other states would also be a waste of time & money.
The point of the recount was never that the recount itself would show any significant change in numbers (as D. MAcKay right points out). The point of the recount was to establish a separate count of contested ballots. For one example (of many different reasons for contested ballots), Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell advised voters in March to indicate they are indefinitely confined because of the pandemic when applying for an absentee ballot if they were having difficulty submitting a copy of their photo ID. As it turns out, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that such an idea is contrary to Wisconsin election law (meaning the pandemic itself is not a legal justification for declaring oneself “confined”). In theory, any such vote should be invalid.
Yet in 2016 there were only 56,978 confined voters ballots that mushroomed to 215,713 in 2020, leading to a justified suspicion that the increase is in violation of Wisconsin law (and the difference there alone is more than enough to give Trump a landslide victory).
So the point of all this is to show the clear and open public violation of election law – a violation that was even openly encourage by the County Clerk himself. And the so-called mainstream media ignore all this (I had to search for the “local news” to get any real information or understanding) and in that manner hoping to add this to their mind-boggling long list of Democrat crimes that they are complicit in covering up by ignoring to report the facts and reporting lies in place of facts.
Amazing when you recount ballotts including the suspicious and fraudulent – and you don’t remove the suspsicious and the fraudulent the out come stays the same.
Ballotts were only conted in the three counties – though Kraken live monitred all the voting computers – more still to come
Wow 3 comments all from
One guy . As the president elect would say would you shut up man ?
Genivas daas is also stealing . I believe that was the real steal here . We knew darn well that a vaccine would be out two days after elections . They also knew the polls were wrong yet continued to lie since who votes for a loser ?
I can’t believe the Trump hatred by the commenters on this site and in the media in general. I don’t need Mr. Trump to tell me the election was a fraud and it was stolen from him. Anyone following the vote count on election night saw it. The problem for Trump is to find the smoking gun. That is very hard to do when you have to gather evidence in under 4 weeks. How can anyone explain that on election night Trump was on a roll. He was winning one state after another and all of a sudden the 6 states he was supposed to win and was winning by a large margin at 2am, yet 4 hours latter he fell behind in most of them and finally lost them. How do you explain something the historically never happened and statistically can’t happen. The “winner” didn’t help his party win seats in congress or the senate yet the “loser” help his party big time. How do you explain that blacks and Latino voters across the country voted for Trump in record numbers except in the minority districts of these swing states. Anyone that believes Biden won this election fairly – well I have a bridge to sell them.