Milwaukee County's recount of the presidential election that the Trump campaign paid for came to an end on Friday evening, a week after the effort to recount close to 460,000 ballots cast in the county at the downtown Wisconsin Center began.
Early Friday evening, the board of canvassers certified the recount that netted both President-elect Joe Biden and President Donald Trump a total of 382 votes: 257 for Biden and 125 for Trump, adding a total of 132 votes to Biden's margin of victory.
Out of 459,723 ballots cast in the county, Biden received 317,527 votes while Trump amassed 134,482 votes in his favor, giving the former Vice President a victory of more than 180,000 votes in Milwaukee county, Wisconsin's largest. Before the recount, Biden had 317,270 votes in Milwaukee County as opposed to Trump's 134,357.
The Trump campaign paid $3 million for the partial recount after losing the state by nearly 21,000 votes to Biden, requesting a retallying of the votes only in Wisconsin's most populous and Democrat-leaning counties of Milwaukee and Dane.
Dane County is expected to finish its recount and certify results this weekend, after which the state will certify the election results next week.
Trump Campaign Tries to Invalidate Absentee Ballots
The Trump campaign is seeking to disqualify absentee ballots cast during the Nov. 3 election in both Dane and Milwaukee, arguing that large batches of the ballots had been improperly accepted and counted in both counties. They sought to disqualify all absentee ballots that had been cast before Election Day in person, rather than by mail.
The ballots Trump is seeking to disqualify also affects residents who identify themselves as "indefinitely confined," allowing them to vote via absentee ballots without meeting the state photo ID requirements. So far, their efforts have been thwarted by the Democratic-majority boards of canvassers in both counties, which have denied attempts to set aside the large categories of ballots.
This is one of Trump's many attempts to undo Biden's victory in the presidential election with false claims of widespread fraud but the president has suffered one defeat after another. Trump suffered another blow on Saturday, after a federal judge in Pennsylvania rejected the campaign's efforts to stop the state from certifying its election results. The Trump campaign filed an appeal Sunday.
