Wisconsin’s Dane County completed its recount on Sunday and President-elect Joe Biden remained the winner in the key battleground state. The state will certify the election results on Monday, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission said Sunday.
The recount in Dane County netted 45 more votes for President Trump than the initial canvass. Milwaukee County, which completed its recount on Friday, gave Mr. Biden 132 more votes, giving Mr. Biden a net increase of 87 votes in the two counties that conducted recounts.
The Trump campaign had sought to throw out all absentee ballots submitted in-person in Dane County, which amounted to about 69,000 votes. That petition was rejected by the Wisconsin Board of Canvassers on November 20, the first day of the recount.
The Board of Canvassers rejected all of the Trump campaign’s attempts to throw out the absentee ballots, but they unanimously voted to allow those ballots to be challenged as a group, rather than one at a time as they had been doing at the start of the recounts. The Trump campaign could challenge these same ballots in court.
Danielle Melfi, the Wisconsin state director for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement the recount reaffirmed the president-elect’s victory.
“Throughout the process, Dane and Milwaukee County Boards of Canvassers resoundingly rejected — often on a bipartisan basis — the Trump campaign’s baseless attempts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites who simply followed the law when they voted,” Melfi said. “And despite repeated incendiary accusations, there was no evidence of fraud whatsoever. The facts are clear: after ballots were counted and counted again, Joe Biden decisively won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes.”
On Saturday, before the final results of the recount were announced, Mr. Trump baselessly claimed on Twitter that his campaign had found “many illegal votes.” Mr. Trump wrote that the point of the recount was not to find more votes but about “finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday.”
The Trump campaign has brought several lawsuits in other states to prevent the certification of the election results. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit brought by Republicans that had led to a temporary stay in certifying the results of the November 3 election, although the presidential election results had already been certified when the stay was issued.
Legal challenges by the Trump campaign in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada have also failed.
Adam Brewster contributed to this report.
