As Milwaukee County, Wisconsin's largest, certified its presidential general election results on Friday (local time) after a recount requested by the Trump campaign, President-elect Joe Biden saw a small net gain in votes while Donald Trump, who is just left with only a month to leave the White House, suffered a loss of votes to his presidential rival once again.
As per CNN reports, the results showed a net gain of 132 votes for Biden, with Trump receiving 134,482 votes and Biden receiving 317,527 after the recount, the Milwaukee County Board of Canvassers announced on Friday night.
But more than 27,000 ballots that are part of the count have been segregated after objections by the Trump campaign.
The campaign had objected to more than 25,000 absentee ballots cast by individuals who self-identified as "indefinitely confined," which allowed them to vote absentee because of pandemic fears.
The campaign also objected to 2,197 ballots that had been "cured," a legally allowed action in which an election official fills in a missing piece of information on a ballot envelope, often identified because the official did it in a different ink from the voter.
Wisconsin officials found no fraud
According to the Milwaukee County Clerk's office, the Trump campaign has signalled that it will appeal the certification decision, based on the dispute over these segregated votes. After the recount, Claire Woodall-Vogg, the chief election official for the City of Milwaukee, accepted that the ballots were not initially counted due to "human error."
"I promised this would be a transparent and fair process, and it was," said Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson. "This recount demonstrated what we already know. That elections in Milwaukee County are fair, transparent, accurate and secure. We have once again demonstrated good government in Wisconsin," Christenson added.
Trump's campaign had demanded recounts in two of Wisconsin's most populous and Democratic-leaning counties after he lost Wisconsin to Biden by more than 20,000 votes. The two recounts cost the Trump campaign USD 3 million. Dane county is still expected to finish its recount on Sunday.
Overall, Biden won November's US presidential election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump's 232. Biden also leads by more than 6 million in the popular vote tally.
After the news broke, netizens took to Twitter to make fun of the situation, some saying, "I could have told him that, and he would've only had to pay me half that", while others claiming blatantly, #DiaperDonald will probably declare the recount was rigged".
However, the game is not over for the Trump campaign as it is still expected to mount a legal challenge to the overall result in Wisconsin, but time is running out. The state is due to certify its presidential result on Tuesday.
Trump continued to maintain without evidence that there was election fraud in the state, tweeting early on Saturday: "The 1,126,940 votes were created out of thin air. I won Pennsylvania by a lot, perhaps more than anyone will ever know."
Earlier on Friday, Trump's legal team suffered yet another defeat when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected the campaign's latest effort to challenge the state's election results.
Trump's lawyers said they would take the case to the supreme court despite the Philadelphia judges' assessment that the "campaign's claims have no merit".
Trump's baseless claims of electoral fraud in various states are increasingly worrying his own party as Republicans are concerned that the chaos caused by Trump's stance and his false comments on the conduct of the election in the key swing state, which Biden won for the Democrats, could hinder his party's efforts to retain control of the Senate.
