Here & Now

Maria Lazar, Chris Taylor on Wisconsin's 2020 Vote Lawsuit

Frederica Freyberg:
In the last few weeks, President Donald Trump has continued to dredge up conspiracy theories about his election loss to Joe Biden in 2020. Election controversies are often settled in court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election is less than a month away, pitting conservative candidate Judge Maria Lazar against liberal candidate Judge Chris Taylor. “Here & Now” senior political reporter Zac Schultz interviewed the candidates about an important Supreme Court decision from the 2020 election to ask them how they would have ruled.

Protesters:
We won. Let’s go.

Zac Schultz:
In the days after Joe Biden won Wisconsin and the race for president in 2020, Donald Trump and his supporters immediately began spreading election conspiracies. Among his efforts to overturn the election, Trump’s campaign sued in Wisconsin, attempting to throw out 220,000 ballots in Dane and Milwaukee Counties, the two largest democratic areas of the state. The case reached the Wisconsin Supreme Court as Trump v Biden and with conservatives in control of the court, it was Justice Brian Hagedorn who sided with the three liberal justices to deny Trump’s request and refuse to take the case, saying the campaign did not have standing to sue. The three other conservatives did not say whether they would have sided with Trump and thrown out the ballots, but they would have taken the case. We asked the candidates in this election how they would have ruled if they’d been on the court.

Chris Taylor:
I would have rejected that effort. Again, that stands in contrast with my opponent. My opponent has been supported in the past in her Court of Appeals race by the same individuals that led the charge in trying to overturn our 2020 election. I think that was the right decision. That was, again, a one — only a one vote decision, which is alarming because if that case had been successful, hundreds of thousands of votes in the state of Wisconsin would have been thrown out. And that’s alarming to me.

Zac Schultz:
Judge Lazar, like the conservatives who dissented in that case, focused on whether Trump had standing to file suit.

Maria Lazar:
This is sort of an area that’s really deeply in flux with our state Supreme Court. They have issued several opinions that have gone around the edges of it, and so I’m not going to comment any further on where they would go, because I honestly believe that standing is going to come back up in our next term. So when I’m on this court, I don’t want to have someone say, “You said in an interview, so now you can’t rule in this case.”

Zac Schultz:
As far as whether someone’s going to say, “Well, you didn’t answer the question. Trump v Biden, would you have overturned all those votes?” Can you give me a reaction to that?

Maria Lazar:
I have answered the question, but with respect to overturning votes, I strongly believe that every vote should be counted. So every legal valid vote should be counted. So I wouldn’t comment, and I don’t actually know the parameters of how they were going to try to disenfranchise or not disenfranchise voters. So I really don’t have any further thing that I can say about that case.

Zac Schultz:
Reporting from Madison, I’m Zac Schultz for “Here & Now.”