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 casts, 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 the 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.
This is an excerpt from Jsonline
