MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential results Sunday, reconfirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory by more than 20,000 votes over President Donald Trump in the key battleground state. Mr. Trump vowed to challenge the outcome in court even before the recount concluded.
After Milwaukee County completed its tally Friday and Dane County concluded its count Sunday, there was little change in the final breakdown of the more than 800,000 ballots that had been cast in the two jurisdictions. As a result of the recount, Mr. Biden’s lead over Mr. Trump in Wisconsin grew by 87 votes.
Dane County reported a 45-vote gain for Mr. Trump. Milwaukee County, the state’s other big and overwhelmingly liberal county, reported a 132-vote gain for Mr. Biden.
Taken together, the two counties barely budged Mr. Biden’s winning margin of about 20,600 votes, giving him a net gain of 87 votes.
“As we have said, the recount only served to reaffirm Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin,” Danielle Melfi, who led Mr. Biden’s campaign in Wisconsin, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
With no precedent for overturning a lead as large as Mr. Biden’s, Mr. Trump was widely expected to head to court once the recount was finished. His campaign challenged thousands of absentee ballots during the recount, and even before it was complete, Mr. Trump tweeted that he would sue.
“The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday,” the president tweeted Saturday. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”
But even if the campaign were to pull out a surprise courtroom win — which legal experts said is unlikely — it would do little to change the outcome of the White House race, which Mr. Biden won with 306 electoral votes. The Electoral College will meet on Dec. 14 to formalize his victory.
Trump campaign officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.
Under Wisconsin law, Mr. Trump was required to foot the bill for the partial recount — meaning his campaign paid $3 million only to see Mr. Biden’s lead expand.
The results of the Wisconsin recount cemented Mr. Trump’s failure to alter the results of the November election in a series of states where he has repeatedly, baselessly and falsely alleged there was widespread fraud and irregularities.
His efforts to stop Michigan officials from certifying the vote there earlier this month ran aground. A hand recount of ballots in Georgia confirmed Mr. Biden’s win in that state. Two new court decisions in Pennsylvania late last week rejected the campaign’s attempts to halt the vote count there — the latest in a series of forceful judicial opinions that have tossed out claims by the president and his allies around the country.
On Monday, Arizona — the fifth of the six states where Mr. Trump has tried to upend the vote certification process — is set to finalize its results.
Wisconsin’s deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday. Certification is done by the Democratic chair of the six-member Wisconsin Election Commission, which is bipartisan.
The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against state election officials seeking to block certification of the results. It makes many of the claims Mr. Trump is expected to make.
Gov. Tony Evers’ attorneys have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the suit. Mr. Evers, a Democrat, said the complaint is a “mishmash of legal distortions” that uses factual misrepresentations in an attempt to take voting rights away from millions of Wisconsin residents.
Another suit filed over the weekend by Wisconsin resident Dean Mueller argues that ballots placed in drop boxes are illegal and must not be counted.
Mr. Trump’s attorneys have complained about absentee ballots where voters identified themselves as “indefinitely confined,” allowing them to cast an absentee ballot without showing a photo ID; ballots that have a certification envelope with two different ink colors, indicating a poll worker may have helped complete it; and absentee ballots that don’t have a separate written record for its request, such as in-person absentee ballots.
Election officials in the two counties counted those ballots during the recount but marked them as exhibits at the request of the Trump campaign.
Legal experts have said the arguments advanced by the Trump campaign during the recount were thin. They also said that even if judges were to conclude that some practices by Wisconsin clerks were technically flawed, they would be extremely unlikely to throw out tens of thousands of ballots cast by voters who did nothing wrong other than follow rules, as directed by election officials.
Further undermining the Trump campaign’s argument, experts said, is the fact that it raised only objections in two predominantly Democratic counties.
The practices that Trump lawyers criticized are in place statewide and have been for years, including for the 2016 election — which Mr. Trump won and did not contest.
Their arguments would not invalidate only votes for Mr. Biden. Documents prepared as part of the Dane County recount showed that the Trump campaign’s own lead attorney in Wisconsin, James Troupis, had voted early and in person. So, he essentially argued that his own vote was illegal and should not be counted. Mr. Troupis did not respond to requests for comment.
“This whole strategy is so shortsighted. It’s so self-destructive in the long term,” said James Wigderson, a conservative activist and editor of the website RightWisconsin.
He argued the GOP gambit sent a strong message to voters of color that the Republican Party believes their votes are less valid than those cast in mostly white suburbs and rural areas.
“Republicans should be outraged by this,” Mr. Wigderson said.
In announcing Dane County’s results Sunday, County Clerk Scott McDonell noted that the recount had found no instances of fraud. He said the process should “reassure” the public about the accuracy of the count, but he added that he found it “disturbing” that the Trump campaign had targeted only two Democratic counties for practices in place across Wisconsin.
Under Wisconsin law, Mr. Trump was allowed to request the recount because Mr. Biden’s margin of victory — about 0.6% — was less than 1%. However, Mr. Trump’s campaign was required to pay for the recount because Biden’s margin was more than 0.25%. Mr. Trump could have requested a full statewide recount, at a cost of nearly $8 million; instead, his campaign opted to pay less for a narrower recount.
“This recount demonstrated what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee County are fair, transparent, accurate and secure,” County Clerk George Christenson said as the county election commission voted to certify its results Friday. “We have once again demonstrated good government in Wisconsin.”
The Washington Post contributed.
First Published: November 29, 2020, 10:16 p.m.
