Arizona Certifies Biden’s Victory, and Wisconsin Is Expected to Certify Within Hours
President-elect Joe Biden formally announced his economic team and received his first full presidential daily briefing.
Arizona on Monday officially certified President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s narrow victory in a state President Trump won four years ago, further undermining the quixotic efforts of Mr. Trump and his supporters to portray his decisive national loss as a matter still under dispute.
In another blow to Mr. Trump, Wisconsin was also expected on Monday to certify Mr. Biden as the winner of its election, said Ann Jacobs, the chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Monday’s certifications would be an afterthought in any other year. But in an environment where Mr. Trump’s false claims of massive fraud have created an alternate reality among his die-hard backers — in the West Wing and beyond — the results foreclosed his fanciful final path to victory.
Mr. Trump, buoyed by his legal team and supporters in the conservative media, has held out hope that he could somehow prevail in Wisconsin, Arizona and in Georgia, where Republican officials on Monday firmly refused to challenge Mr. Biden’s win there.
In Arizona, Mr. Biden prevailed by over 10,000 votes, mainly because of his strength in the state’s largest county, Maricopa, which has been trending Democratic in recent elections.
The state will deliver its 11 electoral votes to Mr. Biden when the Electoral College meets next month, a ceremonial conclave that Mr. Trump hopes to flip in his favor despite state laws that forbid electors from defying the will of voters.
The expected certification in Wisconsin follows the conclusion of recounts, requested and subsidized with $3 million from President Trump’s campaign, in Dane and Milwaukee Counties that resulted in Mr. Biden adding 87 votes to his statewide margin.
Ms. Jacobs, a Milwaukee Democrat, said that certifying the result of the presidential election comes at her discretion and that she expected the move to kickstart legal challenges from the Trump campaign.
“The power to do this is vested solely in the chair,” Ms. Jacobs said.
Ms. Jacobs said the elections commission certification would happen at the beginning of the body’s Monday afternoon meeting. The six-member bipartisan commission is scheduled to meet again Tuesday morning to certify the state’s other election results.
Two weeks ago the Trump campaign requested recounts in Dane and Milwaukee, the state’s two largest and most Democratic counties, in an effort to build a legal case against Mr. Biden’s statewide victory. Mr. Biden won Wisconsin by 20,565 votes, a margin that was always highly unlikely to be overturned in a recount.
The Trump campaign has argued in its recount petition that all ballots cast at pre-Election Day in-person absentee voting sites should be disqualified because, it claimed incorrectly, those absentee ballots were issued without voters submitting a written application requesting the ballot.
Its argument would throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots across Wisconsin, including those cast by prominent Trump supporters, such as several state legislators and one of the president’s lawyers, Jim Troupis, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.