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MADISON, Wisconsin (AP) – Milwaukee County completed its presidential ballot recount on Friday, seeing only small changes in the vote totals for one of two counties in Wisconsin that recount the ballots, but lawyers for President Donald Trump appear ready for a legal challenge to launch dozens. thousands of ballots.
President-elect Joe Biden’s advance increased by 132 votes after county election officials recounted more than 450,000 votes. Biden, a Democrat, won the state by nearly 20,600 votes, and his margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties was about 2 to 1.
Trump paid to have a recount in those two counties, which have a large number of Democratic voters. As of Friday morning, Trump had won 68 votes to Biden in Dane County, but election officials don’t expect to finish until Sunday.
Milwaukee County’s vote totals increased for both candidates when election officials found several hundred ballots, election officials said. Election officials said those ballots were initially not counted due to “human error”.
“I promised it would be a transparent and fair process, and it was,” Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said.
Trump’s campaign appears to be preparing a legal challenge to change the election outcome, but his prosecution window is narrow. The deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday. Certification is performed by the Democratic chairman of the Wisconsin Election Commission, which is bipartisan.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a complaint against election officials, seeking to block the certification of results. This echoes many of the claims Trump should be making.
Lawyers for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers filed a response to the lawsuit on Friday, calling it a “brazen attack on democracy itself” and asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss it.
Evers, a Democrat, said the group’s lawsuit is a “mishmash of legal distortions” that uses factual statements to try to take away the franchise from millions of Wisconsin residents. He argues that failure to certify election results would nullify other election results statewide, plunging the government into chaos.
Trump’s lawyers have targeted mail-in ballots where voters identified themselves as “indefinitely confined”, allowing them to vote by mail without showing photo ID; ballots that have a certification envelope with two different ink colors, indicating that a poll officer may have helped fill it out; and mail-in ballots that do not have a separate written record for his application, such as in-person mail-in ballots.
Election officials counted these ballots during the recount, but marked them as exhibits at the behest of the Trump campaign.
Trump’s campaign has already failed elsewhere in court without evidence of widespread fraud, what experts widely recognize does not exist. Trump’s legal challenges have failed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
On Monday, the federal government recognized Biden as the “apparent winner” of the Nov. 3 election against Trump. Even though Trump continued his attacks on the election, he said he was helping Biden with the transition.
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