The Trump campaign filed a petition with the Supreme Court to challenge a decision from Wisconsin’s high court that attempted to toss out more than 50,000 votes and overturn the results of the election.
Rudy Giuliani, who is leading the legal team, announced Tuesday that they requested an expedited review to consider the case before Jan. 6, when Congress is expected to certify the votes cast by the Electoral College.
“Regrettably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in their 4-3 decision, refused to address the merits of our claim,” Trump attorney Jim Troupis said in a statement. “This ‘Cert Petition’ asks them to address our claims, which, if allowed, would change the outcome of the election in Wisconsin.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court denied the president’s request to invalidate large swathes of absentee ballots earlier this month, arguing that Trump’s legal team failed to provide sufficient evidence to demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of votes had illegally been cast.
“We conclude the Campaign is not entitled to the relief it seeks,” the court ruled. “The challenge to the indefinitely confined voter ballots is meritless on its face, and the other three categories of ballots challenged fail under the doctrine of laches. … [The campaign] does not succeed in its effort to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
The judges likened the case to an attempt by a sports team to challenge “the rulebook adopted before the season began.”
The Trump team claims that more than 28,000 votes were cast by people “who failed to provide identification by abusing the state’s ‘indefinitely confined’ status,” nearly 6,000 absentee ballots that “contained incomplete and altered ballot envelopes,” and more than 17,000 ballots that were “collected by hand, in direct contravention of the statutes.”
The Supreme Court agreed to take up another petition from the Trump campaign addressing allegations of widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania — but appeared to snub the outgoing president by setting the date for Pennsylvania’s response for Jan. 22, two days after President-elect Joe Biden is set to be inaugurated.
The Pennsylvania case takes issue with several decisions handed down by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upholding the state’s laws allowing for greater latitude for mail-in ballots. Trump’s legal team claims there is a “strong likelihood” Pennsylvania’s high court violated the Constitution, arguing that decisions by the Pennsylvania Legislature on mail-in ballots led to fraud.
