Wisconsin seeks over $250,000 in legal fees incurred from GOP election lawsuits

Wisconsin is seeking more than $250,000 in legal fees incurred from challenges to the 2020 presidential election filed by former President Trump and his GOP allies.

Lawyers for Gov. Tony Evers (D) filed court papers on Wednesday asking for legal fees from two different lawsuits that were filed in a Milwaukee federal court.

The suits were among multiple unsuccessful lawsuits that Trump and his allies filed in Wisconsin and other swing states seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

President Biden won in The Badger State by just over 20,000 votes.

Evers is seeking $145,174 from one suit filed by the Trump campaign alleging that state election officials likely tainted over 50,000 ballots in the state.

“The audacity of this lawsuit—an attack on the bedrock principle that ballots decide elections, brought without any legal or factual basis, more than four weeks after the election—merits the imposition of both a fee award and a punitive sanction,” Evers’s attorneys wrote.

U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig dismissed the suit in early December, ruling at the time that Trump’s arguments “fail as a matter of law and fact.”

Evers filed in another case seeking $106,780 in legal fees from a lawsuit brought against the state from William Feehan, the chairman of a local Republican Party in the state, which also alleged that election officials tampered with ballots in the election.

That suit notably alleged that votes were switched to Biden by voting machines that used software created by late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. The baseless conspiracy theory was notably pushed by lawyer Sidney Powell, who represented Feehan in the suit.

It’s not the first time that election officials have sought legal fees over a failed election. In mid-March, the Arizona Republican Party was ordered to pay $18,000 to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) over a bid to establish a new audit of sampling ballots.

In Georgia, DeKalb and Cobb counties have filed for nearly $20,000 combined from lawsuits seeking to overturn the election in that state.