MILWAUKEE (CN) — Democratic challenger Joe Biden was declared the winner of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes Wednesday afternoon by a margin of roughly 20,000 votes, though President Donald Trump has already demanded a recount after a night of twists and turns.
CNN and the Associated Press declared Biden the winner in the Badger State’s close presidential race, shortly after a statement from Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien cited “ridiculous public polling used as a voter suppression tactic” and “irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results” as the basis for a recount, though neither claim has been proven to be true.
Trump’s demand for a recount comes on the heels of a late boost of votes Biden got in the early morning hours of Wednesday as a massive amount of absentee ballot results from Milwaukee and other parts of the state were counted and tabulated.
State, county and city election officials have been reiterating for months leading up to Election Day that particularly Milwaukee would need until at least 3 or 4 a.m. to count and tabulate nearly 170,000 absentee and mail-in ballot results, in part because state law did not let election officials even begin to count them until 7 a.m. on Tuesday.
This combined with similar late returns from Green Bay and Kenosha, both moderately liberal medium-sized cities in purple counties, pushed Biden ahead by just over 20,000 votes as of Wednesday morning.
After late results put him behind in the race, Trump fumed Wednesday morning with baseless claims that the shift in results as absentee ballots were counted and reported was a fraudulent attempt to tilt the needle in Biden’s favor.
During a midday press conference via Zoom, Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election official, assured over 100 people viewing that “yesterday’s voting process and election night counting went very well in Wisconsin…it proceeded in normal fashion.”
Although Wolfe declined to respond directly when a reporter asked her about the president’s claims of fraud and demand for a recount, she reiterated that every scrap of data and every step of the process surrounding voting and elections can be readily observed and vetted by the public and referred to claims of wrongdoing by state election workers as “insulting.”
Taking care to pause between every word for emphasis, Wolfe said “every step of the elections process is publicly observable.”
The state’s elections chief added that “nothing about yesterday was surprising to me” and “there are no dark corners or locked doors in elections.”
State law requires that Wisconsin’s 1,850 municipalities finalize their results and send them to the state’s 72 counties by 4 p.m. Wednesday. The counties then independently certify the results before sending the canvass to the state, which then certifies and reports the final results, a process Wolfe said will take until Dec. 1.
Per the state elections commission, for a recount to occur the election results first have to be canvassed and certified by every county, the deadline for which is Nov. 17, although the final report from the last county could come in earlier. For presidential elections, the candidate requesting the recount then has one day to file a formal request, according to state law.
The results margin between the candidates also has to be within 1% for there to be a recount. This is the case as Wisconsin’s results currently stand, as Biden is ahead of Trump by 20,470 votes, or 0.62%.
However, the recount law also states that if the margin between candidates is larger than 0.25%, the candidate asking for a recount must prepay for the costs of it, which according to Wolfe mostly includes staffing and supplies but also could involve renting a larger space to conduct the recount and acquiring voting machines if necessary. The recount is the purview of the counties, and they make the call over whether to recount by hand or use machines.
Follow @cnsjkelly
