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Supporters of President Donald Trump demonstrate on Nov. 7 at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Maricopa County Elections Department office in Phoenix.
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Arizona certified President-elect Joe Biden as the winner of the state’s 11 electoral votes Monday afternoon, while the Wisconsin Elections Commission made official a pair of county recounts that increased Biden’s lead in the state by 87 votes to 20,695.
The WEC administrator will next send the official vote tally to Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers, who will decide whether to approve the slate of Biden electors.
The two battlegrounds were the only states remaining of about six that the Trump campaign aimed to flip in one combination or another to stake a plausible claim at the 38 additional electoral votes he’d need to win a second term.
President Trump, however, remained defiant — tweeting and telling a sympathetic television host that his apparent loss is the result of vast election fraud, though his campaign has presented no evidence of widespread illegal voting.
The president tweeted on Saturday that the end of the Wisconsin recount opened the door for a lawsuit challenging enough votes to overturn the results there, to be filed by Tuesday.
This weekend, a Wisconsin voter filed suit at the Wisconsin Supreme Court asking its justices to throw out the result of the Nov. 3 election because he claims the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes were illegal, and hold another election or have the state’s Republican legislature appoint its 10 presidential electors.
Similar legal strategies across the country, however, have failed time and again. The Trump campaign has lost 39 court cases since Election Day, and won just one victory in Pennsylvania state court, which barred the counting of a few hundred provisional ballots in the state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes, according to the progressive voting-rights group Democracy Docket.
The Trump campaign suffered perhaps its most significant legal defeat in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit Friday, in a case where it attempted to throw out millions of votes in Pennsylvania based on unsubstantiated allegations that votes were counted without the supervision of Republican poll watchers.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” the decision read. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
There are just eight days remaining before states are required to send their certified presidential election results to the Archivist of the United States, and electors across the country will formally cast their votes for president on Dec. 14.
