United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused Democratic candidate Joe Biden of election fraud, and said that he will move the Supreme Court as he wanted the counting of votes to stop.
“This is a major fraud in our nation,” the president said at a press conference. “We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So, we will be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballot at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
Responding to Trump’s claim, Democrat rival Joe Biden’s campaign said it has “legal teams standing by...ready to deploy to resist that effort”. “If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort,” the statement read. “And they will prevail.”
Trump has continuously undermined faith in the mail-in ballot process, which can sometimes take days to count. His statement implied that he wanted to stop the counting of mail-in ballots, which has been suspended for the night. It will resume in a few hours.
Trump also claimed that he has “won” the election even as vote-counting is yet to be completed in a few states. Election results from some states, including Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are not announced yet. Further, Trump was still short of meeting the 270 electoral votes needed to win the 2020 US polls.
Based on CNN’s current projections, Joe Biden has 220 electoral votes while Trump has 213. The New York Times reported that Biden has earned 225 electoral college votes and Trump 213.
“As far as I’m concerned we already have won this,” the American president said at the press conference, despite not meeting the requisite figure. “So I want to thank all of our supporters and I want to thank everybody that worked with us.”
The president also said that the Republicans were winning almost all states where counting was going on. “We don’t even need all of them, but we are still winning,” he said.
Also read:
- US polls: Frankly, we have already won, claims Trump as four states yet to be called
- Twitter flags Donald Trump’s tweet after he accuses Democrats of ‘stealing elections’
Trump was, earlier on Wednesday, declared the winner in Florida, a state crucial to his re-election hopes. He also established a victory in Ohio, as the race against Democratic rival Joe Biden tightened. No Republican candidate has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio.
Biden, however, has expressed confidence he would ultimately prevail, saying he believed “we are on track to win this election”. Shortly after Biden spoke, Trump responded on Twitter and accused the Democrats of stealing the election. Twitter immediately marked his remarks as content that was “disputed and might be misleading”.
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