Conservative Lawsuit Asks Wis. Supreme Court to Throw Out the Entire Election

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By Jonathon Sadowski

November 25, 2020

Attorney General Josh Kaul says the lawsuit “seeks to disenfranchise every Wisconsinite who voted.”

A conservative lawsuit filed Tuesday asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to stop Wisconsin from certifying its election results—thereby invalidating all 3.2 million votes cast in the election—and allow the Republican-led state Legislature to override the popular vote to choose the state’s electors.

In the filing, Erick Kaardal, a Republican lawyer from Minneapolis who represented rapper Kanye West during his failed attempt to get on Wisconsin’s presidential ballot, claims without evidence there were more than 150,000 “illegal votes counted” throughout the state, so the entire election should be thrown out. The Wisconsin Elections Commission has repeatedly said it found no evidence of widespread fraud in Wisconsin.

President Donald Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden in Wisconsin by about 20,500 votes, according to unofficial results.

“This litigation seeks to disenfranchise every Wisconsinite who voted in the 2020 presidential election,” Attorney General Josh Kaul wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “[The Wisconsin Department of Justice] will ensure that Wisconsin’s presidential electors are selected based on the will of the more than 3 million Wisconsin voters who cast a ballot.”

Kaardal’s filing does not include any legitimate proof of his claims of widespread fraud. The only alleged evidence presented is a single report authored by Matthew Braynard, a former Trump campaign staffer from Virginia who claims there was widespread fraud. 

Braynard offers no evidence other than to say he hired an unnamed call center to contact voters in Wisconsin. Without disclosing his data or naming any of these voters, he claims “a reasonable degree of scientific certainty” that there were up to 156,807 fraudulent votes cast in the state.

“[T]he election should be declared void and the choice of the Presidential Electors should revert back to the State Legislature,” argued Kaardal, who is representing the Wisconsin Voters Alliance in the case.

State statutes explicitly lay out the process by which electors are selected and sent to the Electoral College. The Legislature, which drafted the laws, does not play any part in the process. Political parties with candidates on the ballot choose the electors before the election, and those electors automatically vote at the Electoral College on behalf of the popular vote winner.

The lawsuit also revives a debunked claim from the Wisconsin Voters Alliance that Wisconsin’s five largest cities—Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha—illegally took private grants to cover election costs. A federal judge in October denied the Voters Alliance’s request to block the cities from receiving grants, writing that the cities did nothing wrong according to state statutes.

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