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“This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits,” US District Judge Brett Ludwig wrote in an opinion on Saturday, dismissing a Trump campaign lawsuit that accused Wisconsin election officials of violating state law and asking the court to effectively void Biden’s 20,000-vote lead and let the Republican-controlled state legislature decide what to do.
Ludwig, who joined a small but notable group of Trump’s own judicial nominees who have ruled against the president’s election challenges, made clear that what Trump wanted the court to do was extreme, using the word “extraordinary” in italics three times. He concluded with a statement that read like a rebuttal to the baseless claims of Trump, his lawyers, and his supporters that the courts, along with voting systems across the country, were rigged against them.
“In his reply brief, plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed,’” wrote Ludwig. “It has been.”
“Plaintiff ‘asks that the Rule of Law be followed.’ It has been.”
Ludwig’s order came one day after a state court judge rejected Trump’s appeal of recounts that failed to change Biden’s win in the most racially diverse counties in the state, Milwaukee and Dane counties.
The campaign’s lawyers immediately appealed and the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments on Saturday. On Monday, the state justices issued a 4-3 decision denying the campaign’s challenge, finding Trump and his lawyers had waited far too long to bring challenges to how the state ran absentee voting this year.
“Election claims of this type must be brought expeditiously. The Campaign waited until after the election to raise selective challenges that could have been raised long before the election,” Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the majority. “The Campaign is not entitled to relief, and therefore does not succeed in its effort to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.”
In Georgia, meanwhile, the state Supreme Court on Saturday refused to take up Trump’s statewide election contest. The state justices wrote that they didn’t have jurisdiction to hear the case because the campaign had skipped ahead and filed a petition before there was any lower court decision to appeal. The campaign argued there was “significant systemic misconduct, fraud, and other irregularities” in how Georgia ran the election, but the justices found Trump failed to show that it was “one of those extremely rare cases” that they could take up right away.
Trump and Republicans have lost dozens of lawsuits filed since Election Day, sometimes losing a single case multiple times when they’ve tried to appeal. That number could continue to grow; Trump immediately took Ludwig’s decision in Wisconsin to the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit.
The GOP election challenges have come in roughly two waves after Nov. 3. The first wave largely focused on objections to specific clusters of ballots or election practices at the city and county level. In Pennsylvania, Trump’s campaign and Republicans challenged sets of absentee ballots — ranging from several dozen to several thousand votes — where the voter didn’t include pieces of information on the outside envelope, such as their address or the date. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled those ballots could be counted.
There were cases claiming Republican poll watchers were denied access to watch ballots processed at counting sites in Philadelphia and Detroit; that late-arriving absentee ballots were improperly mingled with valid ballots in Chatham County, Georgia; and that election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona, violated state law by using computer software to verify signatures and may have miscounted ballots filled out using Sharpies. Judges rejected those cases, citing a lack of evidence, or the challengers dropped them before a judge ruled.
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