Wisconsin’s Supreme Court tossed two lawsuits regarding the presidential election filed by President Trump’s legal team and the Wisconsin Republican Party.
The court denied the president’s request to invalidate large swathes of absentee ballots, arguing that Trump’s legal team failed to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of votes had illegally been cast.
“We conclude the Campaign is not entitled to the relief it seeks,” the court ruled. “The challenge to the indefinitely confined voter ballots is meritless on its face, and the other three categories of ballots challenged fail under the doctrine of laches. … [The campaign] does not succeed in its effort to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
The judges likened the case to an attempt by a sports team to challenge “the rulebook adopted before the season began.”
The second suit, filed by the Republican Party, was tossed on the grounds that it is up to the voters in Wisconsin to decide whether they needed to request an absentee ballot without providing a photo ID.
Under Wisconsin law, voters have the ability to request an absentee ballot and vote without providing a copy of an ID if they declare themselves “indefinitely confined” because of age, disability, or infirmity, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, absentee ballot requests surged nearly four times the number requested in the 2016 election, from 55,000 ballots to more than 194,000, according to the court filing. Trump and his legal team petitioned the courts to invalidate these ballots.
The court ruled that voters can only declare themselves indefinitely confined for their health, not for the sake of potentially endangering someone else’s health, as is often the case when people believe they may have come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19. The court also found that the state’s Emergency Order 12, the Safer at Home order that was eventually struck down, didn’t render all voters in the state “indefinitely confined,” thereby “obviating the requirement of a valid photo identification to obtain an absentee ballot.”
The justices unanimously agreed on those points, though the court’s liberal justices filed partial dissents on some of the majority opinion.
The majority found that if voters falsely claimed they were indefinitely confined so they could obtain a ballot without providing a photo ID, “their ballots would not count.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied a third case brought by Trump’s legal team earlier this month on the grounds that the campaign lacked the legal standing to appear before the court without first going through the circuit courts.
