Trump Promises Lawsuit Challenging Wisconsin Election Results

President Donald Trump has made his campaign’s next move explicitly clear: it will sue to overturn the Wisconsin election results.

Trump announced the news via a tweet on Saturday.

“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. We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!” he wrote.

Attorneys for the campaign at both the Dane County and Milwaukee County recounts signaled such a strategy for much of the past two weeks as the process has proceeded. Milwaukee County completed its recount on Friday, with both candidates gaining votes but Joe Biden‘s margin expanding by 132 to 183,045 votes.

Dane County is expected to conclude its recount around 10 a.m. Sunday in advance of a December 1st deadline.

Biden led Trump by 20,608 votes going into the recount.

The Trump campaign requested recounts in only Wisconsin’s two largest counties and wired $3 million to the Wisconsin Elections Commission to pay for the work. It issued plenty of challenges to the process as it played out. In Milwaukee County alone, the campaign is challenging approximately 160,000 of the 460,000 votes cast.

Despite another tweet by Trump alleging fraud in the city of Milwaukee, his campaign attorneys never brought a specific charge of fraud and instead focused on objections to process.

In Milwaukee, the Trump campaign is challenging absentee ballots from three different categories: all in-person absentee ballots, 108,947, on the basis of an insufficient application; all applications and absentee ballots cast by voters who declared themselves “indefinitely confined,” particularly after March 25th (approximately 19,000 ballots), on the basis that clerks provided improper guidance; all absentee ballots where clerks completed the witness address (commonly called “mismatched ink” envelopes) on the basis that the address is incomplete and the ballot should be rejected.

In total the campaign filed objections to approximately 160,000 absentee ballots and associated envelopes in the county.

In each case, the county commission said it was following state guidance and law in accepting the ballots.

When the Trump suit is filed, “Monday or Tuesday” according to Trump, it could run into issues.

The conservative Wisconsin Voters Alliance filed a suit Tuesday, November 24th, using many of the same arguments the Trump campaign has used at the recounts. A second suit, challenging all absentee ballots returned by drop box, was filed on Friday. Each suit proposes a remedy of letting the Republican-controlled Legislature pick Wisconsin’s Electoral College delegates.

It is unclear if the Wisconsin Supreme Court would hear all of the suits simultaneously and separately.

Neither Trump nor his campaign has said if they will continue to pursue overturning Wisconsin’s results even if its legal challenges in other states are rejected.

Trump’s lead attorneys in Milwaukee County during the recount were Stewart Karge and Joe Voiland.

In Dane County Trump is being represented by brothers Jim Troupis and Christ Troupis. The former of which has submitted an objection to his own in-person absentee ballot.