Former President Donald Trump is now desperately attempting to snatch Wisconsin from the jaws of his defeat by suddenly claiming he won the state in the 2020 presidential election.
He didn’t.
His reasoning? Since the Wisconsin state Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday sharply curtailing the number of drop boxes for absentee ballots, that must mean all the votes in those boxes in November 2020 were somehow fake — and apparently were all marked for victor Joe Biden.
“This means I won the very closely contested (not actually) Wisconsin Presidential race because they used these corrupt and scandal-ridden Scam Boxes,” he falsely insisted in a post Friday on Truth Social.
There is no evidence that the vote in Wisconsin, or anywhere else in the nation, was fraudulent. Dozens of court cases and several recounts state by state verified Biden’s victory.
Members of Trump’s own Department of Justice found no evidence of fraud after extensive investigations. Trump’s handpicked attorney general, William Barr, called the election fraud claims “bullshit.”
“These allegations were simply not true,” Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, told Trump, he testified last month before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He added that Trump eventually said: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
Trump and Republicans have claimed that drop boxes facilitated cheating but have offered no evidence.
The conservative-controlled Wisconsin court ruled that under current law, absentee ballot drop boxes may only be placed in election offices and that no one other than the voter can return a ballot in person. “Ballot drop boxes appear nowhere in the detailed statutory system for absentee voting,” Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote.
There’s no move in Wisconsin to switch Biden’s victory to Trump.
Critics say the GOP goal is to significantly decrease the number of votes, which is generally considered beneficial to Republicans. One way to do that it to make voting as inconvenient as possible.
Trump said on Fox News in 2020 that “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again” if “voting levels” rose. (Research has shown, however, that mail-in ballots don’t appear to give either party a distinct advantage.)
Trump continues to push for single-day, in-person voting in elections — prohibiting convenient mail-in ballots and early voting that 69% of American voters used in 2020. (Trump votes by mail.) That would be challenging especially for the disabled and the elderly, as well as for those working long hours or two jobs or juggling child care.
“Ultimately, we want same-day voting — one day — and only paper ballots,” Trump said to cheers at a rally in Nashville last month.