Wisconsin Supreme Court hears Trump lawsuit seeking to overturn state’s election – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON – President Donald Trump’s legal team goes before the state Supreme Court on Saturday in one of his last efforts to overturn Wisconsin’s election results after a string of legal defeats.

The arguments — a rarity on a weekend — come a day after a judge turned down the Republican president’s claims that several of Wisconsin’s election practices violated the law and concluded election officials were right to give the state’s 10 electoral votes to Democrat Joe Biden.

The justices will review that decision and are expected to rule before the Electoral College meets at noon Monday.

Trump faces a difficult path. The state Supreme Court last week ruled 4-3 against Trump and his backers in three lawsuits.

In addition, this week the U.S. Supreme Court turned away an attempt by Texas to rescind the results in Wisconsin and three other states, a federal judge in Wisconsin dismissed a lawsuit brought by Trump allies and a different federal judge expressed deep skepticism of yet another case seeking to prevent Wisconsin’s electoral votes from going to Biden.

Biden won Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes out of 3.3 million cast, giving him a margin of victory of 0.6 percentage points. Trump paid $3 million for a recount in Dane and Milwaukee counties, but the recount slightly widened Biden’s win.

Trump brought a lawsuit directly to the state Supreme Court, but the justices rejected it, saying he should start in lower court. Trump then filed a challenge that went before Reserve Judge Stephen Simanek on Friday. After a morning hearing, Simanek ruled against Trump, saying officials had run a fair election.

“There is no credible evidence of misconduct or wide-scale fraud,” he said from the bench.

Hours later, Trump appealed and asked the Supreme Court to take up the case rather than have it go to the Court of Appeals. The justices agreed to take the case and scheduled Saturday’s arguments.

The earlier ruling by the high court shows the difficulty for Trump. A majority refused to take up his initial suit and two of the three dissenters, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack and Justice Annette Ziegler, showed reluctance to throw out large numbers of votes, as Trump requested.

In another 4-3 ruling in a different challenge to the election results last week, Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote a concurring opinion expressing alarm at the prospect of tossing aside the will of the voters.

“This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread,” he wrote. “The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable.”

The three cases the court considered last week fell along the same lines, with Hagedorn, who was elected last year with the support of Republicans, aligning with the court’s three liberals, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky.

In dissent were three conservatives, Roggensack, Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley. (The Bradleys are not related.)

A quest to toss 221,000 ballots

In his challenges to Wisconsin’s election, Trump is not alleging fraud. Rather, he contends several election practices — some of them long-standing — were illegal.

He is seeking to throw out about 221,000 ballots in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two most Democratic parts of the state. He is not asking to eliminate ballots in the state’s 70 other counties that were cast the same way.

Trump’s team argues clerks were wrong to fill in the addresses of witnesses on absentee ballot envelopes. That policy was put forward four years ago at the behest of Republicans on the state Elections Commission and Simanek on Friday found it was an appropriate practice.

The president is also challenging “Democracy in the Park” events held in Madison, where poll workers stationed in more than 200 locations collected absentee ballots. Simanek found the events were legal and likened them to the absentee ballot drop boxes that many cities set up this fall.

Trump argues in-person early voting has been conducted illegally, contending that state law requires voters to fill out two forms instead of one. Clerks have been using one form for more than a decade and Simanek found that practice is acceptable.

Trump also contends clerks gave voters too much latitude to decide if they were confined to their homes. Voters who identify themselves as indefinitely confined do not have to provide a photo ID to vote absentee, as others must.

About 215,000 voters have claimed that status and Republicans contend some of them don’t meet the criteria. Democrats have said the increase in people who consider themselves indefinitely confined is not surprising because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Simanek found officials had adhered to state policies in how they treated such voters.

Litigation brought this spring by the state Republican Party over the indefinite confinement law remains pending before the state Supreme Court. But Simanek noted that guidance from the state Elections Commission on how to administer the indefinite confinement law “was essentially approved by the Wisconsin Supreme Court” in an initial ruling in that case.

Contact Patrick Marley at patrick.marley@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter at @patrickdmarley.

Source Article from https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/12/wisconsin-supreme-court-hears-trump-lawsuit/6521387002/

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Wisconsin Supreme Court hears Trump lawsuit seeking to overturn state’s election – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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