Trump lawsuit claims Wisconsin counted 221K illegal votes

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and his campaign filed an explosive lawsuit claiming that Wisconsin officials included 221,323 illegal votes in the presidential election recount and asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to order Gov. Tony Evers (D-Wisc.) to rescind certification of the state’s election results until any illegal votes can be excluded from the count.

“The people of Wisconsin deserve election processes with uniform enforcement of the law, plain and simple. During the recount in Dane and Milwaukee counties, we know with absolute certainty illegal ballots have unduly influenced the state’s election results,” Jim Troupis, a Trump campaign lawyer, said in a statement. “Wisconsin cannot allow the over three million legal ballots to be eroded by even a single illegal ballot.”

The lawsuit cites four cases of “clear evidence of unlawfulness, such as illegally altering absentee ballot envelopes, counting ballots that had no required application, overlooking unlawful claims of indefinite confinement, and holding illegal voting events called Democracy in the Park.”

According to the lawsuit, the Wisconsin Elections Commission directed municipal clerks to illegally alter incomplete absentee ballot envelopes in violation of state law. Officials told clerks they could rely on their own “personal knowledge” or “lists or databases at his or her disposal” to add missing information to returned absentee ballots. According to Wisconsin law, voters themselves — not election officials — must correct incomplete absentee ballots.

The lawsuit claims that a total of at least 5,517 absentee ballots were improperly counted in this way.

Clerks also allegedly issued absentee ballots to voters without requiring the application that Wisconsin state law requires. According to the lawsuit, clerks in Madison and Milwaukee issued thousands of absentee ballots without collecting a written application during the two-week in-person absentee voting period from October 20, 2020, to November 1, 2020.

The lawsuit claims that election officials improperly counted at least 170,140 absentee ballots for which voters never sent in an application.