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Wisconsin Governor Blasts Sidney Powell’s ‘Wild’ Ballot Suit

Wisconsin Governor Blasts Sidney Powell’s ‘Wild’ Election Suit

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers urged a judge to toss out a lawsuit by former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell challenging the state’s election results, calling her voter-fraud claims “rampant with wild speculation and conspiratorial conclusions.”

The suit on behalf of would-be GOP elector William Feehan includes implausible claims that have “nothing specific to do with Wisconsin” being made by people “with no actual firsthand knowledge” of anything they allege, the governor, a Democrat, said in a filing Wednesday in federal court in Milwaukee.

Wisconsin Governor Blasts Sidney Powell’s ‘Wild’ Ballot Suit

“Plaintiff responds to this detailed refutation of his allegations with… nothing,” Evers said of Feehan.

President-elect Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump in Wisconsin by around 20,000 votes, a victory Powell claims was manufactured by agents of Iran, China and other foreign powers in league with corrupt Democratic officials and abetted by voting machines designed by the regime of deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. She has filed similar suits in three other battleground states Biden carried.

U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper is expected to rule soon on Wisconsin’s motion to dismiss the suit, which Powell filed on Dec. 1, nearly a month after Biden won the election by some 7 million votes. A Georgia judge already dismissed one of Powell’s suits, and a judge in Arizona is also weighing dismissal. A Michigan judge denied Powell’s request for an order blocking certification of the election result, saying the “people have spoken.”

Wisconsin Governor Blasts Sidney Powell’s ‘Wild’ Ballot Suit

Powell is appealing the Georgia and Michigan rulings and has indicated she would like to join her litigation to a long-shot lawsuit filed against the same four battleground states in the U.S. Supreme Court by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, an outspoken Trump supporter.

“We are fast-tracking to SCOTUS,” Powell said in an email.

Though the Texas lawsuit doesn’t make the same conspiracy-laden claims as Powell, legal experts have largely scoffed at its argument that the four states should be barred from participating in the Electoral College because the officials made changes to expand mail-in voting that Paxton claims can only be constitutionally made by legislatures.

The Trump campaign has made that argument in several previous suits without success. In a filing Wednesday in another Wisconsin suit challenging at least 50,000 mail-in ballots cast in Democratic-leaning Milwaukee and Dane counties, the campaign defended its argument that the voting rule changes justified throwing out the entire election and letting the state’s GOP-controlled legislature pick the winner. Any disenfranchisement was the fault of state officials, the campaign said.

Election administrators in the two counties, Wisconsin’s most populous, “dramatically lowered guardrails that made this election, in terms of the rules applied, less secure, less reliable, less fair and more susceptible to fraud than perhaps any election in Wisconsin’s history,” the campaign said.

U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig, a Trump appointee, could rule at any time on dismissal of the campaign’s suit.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.