Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential results on Sunday, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in the key battleground state. Trump vowed to challenge the outcome in court even before the recount concluded.

 

What You Need To Know

  • Wisconsin finished a recount of its presidential results on Sunday, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump

  • The two counties barely budged Biden’s winning margin of about 20,600 votes, giving the winner a net gain of 87 votes

  • On Saturday, before the recount had concluded, Trump vowed to challenge the outcome in court, which a Trump campaign official also told Spectrum News 

 

Dane County was the second and last county to finish its recount, reporting a 45-vote gain for Trump. Milwaukee County, the state’s other big and overwhelmingly liberal county targeted in a recount that Trump paid for, reported its results Friday, a 132-vote gain for Biden.

Taken together, the two counties barely budged Biden’s winning margin of about 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 campaign in Wisconsin, said in a statement to The Associated Press.

With no precedent for overturning a result as large as Biden’s, Trump was widely expected to head to court once the recount was finished. His campaign challenged thousands of absentee ballots during the recount, and even before it was complete, Trump tweeted that he would sue, while also espousing a number of false claims about voter fraud.

The president's Twitter post Saturday was flagged: "This claim about election fraud is disputed." 

Before the president's tweet, a campaign official told Spectrum News that they were planning to challenge the recount results in court.

Trump campaign officials didn’t immediately respond to AP requests for comment on Sunday.

The deadline to certify the vote is Tuesday. Certification is done by the Democratic chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, which is bipartisan.

The Wisconsin Voters Alliance, a conservative group, has already filed a lawsuit against state election officials seeking to block certification of the results. It makes many of the claims Trump is expected to make. Gov. Tony Evers’ attorneys have asked the state Supreme Court to dismiss the suit. Evers, a Democrat, said the complaint is a “mishmash of legal distortions” that uses factual misrepresentations in an attempt to take voting rights away from millions of Wisconsin residents.

Another suit filed over the weekend by Wisconsin resident Dean Mueller argues that ballots placed in drop boxes are illegal and must not be counted.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.