Milwaukee County completed its portion of Wisconsin’s partial presidential recount Friday night after the Milwaukee County Board of Canvassers certified the results.
Milwaukee County ultimately recounted nearly 460,000 votes. President-elect Joe Biden gained 257 votes and President Donald Trump added 125 votes compared to Milwaukee County’s official canvass results. Biden netted an additional 132 votes to his margin of victory in Wisconsin, but Dane County’s recount has yet to finish.
All that stood in the way of completing Milwaukee County’s recount Friday morning was 65 missing ballots from the city of Milwaukee. Those ballots were never found, so the board of canvassers decided to certify the results of all the other ballots in the county.
Tens of thousands of ballots were separated during the recount at the Trump campaign’s request. 51,060 Milwaukee County voters self-certified that they were ‘indefinitely confined’ during the election. All of those voters who submitted their ballots had their ballot envelopes set aside for objections by Trump’s representatives.
Additionally, 2,197 absentee ballot envelopes were separated because they had a different color ink on the witness address line, likely indicating clerks or poll workers filled in that missing information as allowed in the state.
The board of canvassers decided that those votes would still count. The Trump campaign believes both categories could be fraudulent. Rick Bass, the only republican on the county’s 3-person board of canvassers, suggested those ballots will be subject to a Trump campaign legal challenge at a later date.
“I trust that the Trump campaign is looking forward to its day in court,” commissioner Rick Baas said. “There were a number of things that had to be corrected and they’re often represented as just human error and usually they are. There are some things that couldn’t be examined, they’ll be examined at a different venue. This is not that place."
Election officials said that no instances of fraud were found while conducting the recount.
Dane County is expected to finish its presidential recount on Sunday.
This article was written by WTMJ.
