The Supreme Court in the state narrowed yet another legal path for the Trump campaign as it tries to overturn his loss to Joe Biden.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Trump campaign lawsuit that aimed to invalidate more than 200,000 votes cast in two of the state’s Democratic bastions, narrowing yet another legal avenue by which the departing president has tried to overturn the results of the election. The conservative-leaning court’s 4-to-3 vote to decline to take the case stopped one part of a multipronged attempt by President Trump and his supporters to upend Wisconsin’s entire system of absentee voting, which the Trump campaign had sought to cast as violating state law. The court’s three liberal justices and one conservative justice who joined them said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court was not the proper venue for the Trump campaign’s lawsuit and suggested that it refile the suit in a lower state court. “We do well as a judicial body to abide by time-tested judicial norms, even — and maybe especially — in high-profile cases,” wrote Justice Brian Hagedorn, the conservative who sided with the liberals. “Following the law governing challenges to election results is no threat to the rule of law.” Late Thursday, the Trump campaign’s Wisconsin lawyer, James Troupis, filed new, separate lawsuits in Dane County and Milwaukee County that aimed to invalidate votes in the two Democratic areas at issue in the case that the Supreme Court declined to hear. But Mr. Troupis and the Trump campaign are running short on time for any legal action to change the reality of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 20,000-vote victory in Wisconsin.
