The Trump campaign is expected to file a lawsuit in Wisconsin alleging hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots were cast illegally.
The lawsuit will be filed Tuesday morning, days after the state completed a partial recount reaffirming that President-elect Joe Biden won, and a day after Gov. Tony Evers certified the former vice president’s victory, according to Fox News.
The campaign, which has filed a handful of lawsuits in battleground states nationwide as President Trump has refused to concede, believes the suit highlights “a lack of transparency and credibility on part of local election officials and their willful disregard of the law on multiple occasions.”
Jim Troupis, the head of the campaign’s legal efforts in Wisconsin, acknowledged that their efforts won’t change the course of the election given the status of the electoral map.
“Exposing exactly how the election processes were abused in Wisconsin holds enormous value for this election beyond a victory for President Trump, but the fact is, our state’s electoral votes likely won’t change the overall outcome,” he said. “Regardless we’re demonstrating that the results of this election unequivocally ought to be questioned.”
The suit claims officials “made conscious efforts to circumvent Wisconsin law” by disregarding laws regarding absentee ballot request forms. State law requires written absentee ballot request forms to be submitted prior to casting the ballot, but the Trump campaign claims that election officials “accepted ballots without the required absentee applications of file” and says votes without the initial application “must be called into question.”
“If the certificate or envelope is missing a witness address, the ballot cannot be counted until the voter corrects the error — plain and simple,” a campaign official said. “Instead, election officials decided to take the law into their own hands.”
The lawsuit points out that absentee voting is only for voters who are “indefinitely confined,” which translates to voters who are “physically ill, infirm, elderly or disabled” or for those who cannot “vote in person under those terms.” The campaign claims people many voters requested to cast their ballot this way did so “fraudulently.”
The suit also alleges that municipal clerks were “illegally altering ballot envelopes themselves” instead of providing incorrectly filled out ballots back to the voter to be corrected and resubmitted.
The campaign is looking for the judicial system to discard thousands of votes they say were cast illegally.
The campaign has pushed a range of allegations in the time since the election was called for Biden. They have alleged, either in lawsuits or in press conferences, that a coordinated effort of voter fraud and irregularities were deployed to ensure Biden’s victory. The president has pushed the theory that one of the voting machine platforms was compromised, even though the company, Dominion, CEO has rebuked those allegations.
While they have largely been unsuccessful in the courtroom, and many states have already certified their results, it appears that the campaign’s next move is looking to convince GOP-led state legislatures in battleground states such as Pennsylvania to select electors who would cast their Electoral College votes for the president because of a flawed popular vote that fell in Biden’s favor.
An independent lawsuit filed on Monday is looking to get the Wisconsin Supreme Court to toss the results of the presidential election. It argues that the state’s elections commission encouraged “illegal” absentee ballot drop boxes to be placed across the state. A handful of lawsuits have already been filed in Wisconsin.
Last month, three voters filed federal litigation to argue that the absentee voting process in three counties, including the state’s two largest, included “illegal votes” that should nullify the election. That lawsuit was voluntarily dropped by the plaintiffs just days after filing.
