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Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential results on Sunday, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over US President Donald Trump in the key state of the battlefield. Trump promised to challenge the result in court even before the recount was concluded.
Dane County was the second and last county to finish its recount, reporting a 45 vote gain for Trump. Milwaukee County, the other large and overwhelmingly liberal county in the white state of a recount for which Trump paid $ 3 million, reported its results Friday, a 132 vote gain for Biden.
Together, the two counties barely changed Biden’s profit margin of approximately 20,600 votes, giving the winner 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 Biden’s Wisconsin campaign, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Unprecedented for overturning a result as large as Biden’s, Trump was expected to go to court once the recount was over. His campaign challenged thousands of absentee votes during the recount, and even before it was complete, Trump tweeted that he would sue.
“The Wisconsin count is not about finding errors in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will start after the count ends, on Monday or Tuesday,” Trump tweeted on Saturday. “We have found a lot of illegal votes. Stay tuned!”
Trump campaign officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the AP on Sunday.
The deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday. The certification is done by the Democratic chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is bipartisan.
The Wisconsin Alliance of Voters, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against state election officials seeking to block the certification of the results.
He makes many of the claims Trump is expected to make. Lawyers for Governor Tony Evers have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the lawsuit. Evers, a Democrat, called the complaint a “hodgepodge of legal distortions” that uses factual misrepresentations in an attempt to deprive millions of Wisconsin residents of the right to vote.
Another lawsuit filed over the weekend by Wisconsin resident Dean Mueller contends that ballots placed in mailboxes are illegal and should not be counted.
Trump’s attorneys have complained about absentee ballots in which voters identified themselves as “indefinitely confined,” which allowed them to cast an absentee vote without showing photo identification; ballots that have a certification envelope with two different colors of ink, indicating that a poll worker may have helped fill it out; and absentee ballots that do not have a separate written record for their application, such as absentee ballots in person.
Election officials from the two counties counted those ballots during the recount, but marked them as exhibits at the request of the Trump campaign.
The Trump campaign has already failed in other courts without evidence of widespread fraud, which experts broadly agree does not exist. Trump’s legal challenges have failed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.