(Headline USA) Republicans filed a lawsuit Tuesday asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to block certification of the presidential election results as a recount continues.
“We have identified over 150,000 potentially fraudulent ballots in Wisconsin, more than enough to call into question the validity of the state’s reported election results,” said Phill Kline, director of The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, WDJT reported. “Moreover, these discrepancies were a direct result of Wisconsin election officials’ willful violation of state law.”
The lawsuit also asks the court to affirm the right of the Wisconsin legislature to choose Electoral College delegates.
“The litigation filed this afternoon seeks to disenfranchise every Wisconsinite who voted in this year’s presidential election,” said Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. “The Wisconsin Department of Justice will ensure that Wisconsin’s presidential electors are selected based on the will of the more than 3 million Wisconsin voters who cast a ballot.”
The lawsuit also asserts that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to “illegally circumvent Wisconsin absentee voting laws” through grants awarded by a nonprofit center he funds.
At least 10 cases have been filed across the country seeking to halt certification in parts or all of key battleground states, including lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Wisconsin’s election results are scheduled to be certified Dec. 1.
Other claims mirror those by Trump’s campaign.
Those claims allege “cured” absentee ballots should not have been counted, where election officials filled in missing information on the certification envelope that contains the ballot and that voters who identified as “indefinitely confined” were lying to avoid the state’s photo ID law.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission advised clerks that they can fill in missing information on the ballot envelopes, such as the address of a witness. That is an illegal practice.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court this spring affirmed the state elections commission’s guidance that it’s up to each voter to decide whether they are indefinitely confined.
More than 215,000 voters this year said they were confined, which allows them to cast a ballot without having to present a photo ID. The lawsuit says more than 96,000 self-identified confined voters should not count.
Biden won Wisconsin by 20,608 votes, but the lawsuit claims that more than 156,000 ballots should be tossed out.
The lawsuit alleges that more than 14,000 ballots “requested in the name of a registered Republican by someone other than that person” were cast and that more than 12,000 “Republican ballots” were returned but not counted.
The lawsuit comes as the recount in Milwaukee and Dane counties continues.
As of Tuesday morning, Trump had gained just 57 votes. Trump paid for a recount in only the two counties with the largest numbers of Democratic votes.
Nearly 400 absentee ballots cast in Milwaukee that were not opened on Election Day were discovered Tuesday, a mistake that the city’s top elections official attributed to human error. The county board of canvassers voted unanimously to count the ballots as part of the recount, which must be done by Dec. 1.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
