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According to Donald Trump, the Democrats were using “illegal votes” to “steal the election from us. If you count the legal votes, I win easily,” he said. “They are trying to manipulate an election. And we cannot allow that to happen.”
US President Donald Trump speaks in the White House meeting room on November 5, 2020 in Washington, DC. Image: AFP
WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump erupted Thursday into a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been tricked into not winning the U.S. election as the vote count in battle states showed Democrat Joe Biden closing in to victory.
“They are trying to steal the election,” Trump said in an extraordinary statement at the White House two days after the polls closed.
Trump did not provide evidence or answer questions from reporters in the room, and used the nearly 17-minute comments to make the kind of inflammatory statements about the country’s democratic process that had never been heard before from a US president.
According to Trump, the Democrats were using “illegal votes” to “steal our elections.”
“If you count the legal votes, I win easily,” he said. “They are trying to manipulate an election. And we cannot allow that to happen.”
Beyond the rhetoric, Trump’s complaints specifically targeted the integrity of the large number of ballots sent by mail, rather than being cast in person on Election Day.
The big shift to postal ballots this year reflected voters’ desire to avoid the risk of exposure to COVID-19 in crowded polling stations during a pandemic that has already killed more than 230,000 Americans.
Yet because Trump often denied the severity of the virus and told his supporters not to support mail-in ballots, far fewer Republicans took advantage of the option, compared to Democrats.
Several of the major US television networks cut live coverage of Trump’s event shortly after it began, with MSNBC citing the need to correct the president’s false claims.
BIDEN CLOSES IN
Trump’s spiel came as results from yet to be declared states across the country showed Biden had a winning streak.
The 77-year-old Biden was just one or, at most, two states on the battlefield from getting a majority to take the White House. Trump, 74, needed an increasingly unlikely combination of victories in various states to stay in power.
In comments to reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said “we continue to feel great.”
“We have no doubt that when the count is over, Senator (Kamala) Harris and I will be declared the winners,” he said.
Trump, who shocked the world in 2016 when he won the presidency in his first bid for public office, lashed out in a series of written statements before making the appearance at the White House, his first in public since Tuesday’s election night. .
Biden, who has vowed to heal a country battered by Trump’s four extraordinarily polarizing years in power, called for “the people to remain calm.”
“The process is working,” he said in Wilmington. “The count is being completed. And we will know soon.”
ALL ABOUT PENNSYLVANIA?
In Georgia, a generally Republican state, Trump had a steadily slipping lead of less than 3,500 votes. With 98% of the votes already counted, the president and Biden were heading for a photographic finale.
In Arizona and Nevada, Biden kept few leads. If Biden wins both states, he would also win the presidency.
But the biggest piece of the puzzle was Pennsylvania, where Trump’s head start was again steadily depleted as election officials focused on processing mail-in ballots, which are typically cast by Biden supporters.
The Democratic candidate currently has 253 of the 538 electoral college votes distributed among the 50 states of the country. It has 264 with the inclusion of Arizona, which Fox News and the Associated Press have called in its favor, but other major organizations have not.
If Biden took Pennsylvania, he would get 20 more votes from the electoral college, instantly surpassing the 270 needed for overall victory.
With just over 325,000 ballots pending, Pennsylvania Supervisor of Elections Kathy Boockvar told an afternoon news conference that she could not give an estimate for a full recount.
“It’s very close in Pennsylvania, right?” Boockvar said. “That means it will take longer to see who the winner is.”
The latest results showed that Trump’s lead in the state had shrunk to around 61,000 votes.
TRUMP TRIES TO STOP THE COUNTS
The Trump campaign continued to insist that the president has a way of winning, citing pockets of Republican support that have yet to be counted in such close races.
But Trump’s overwhelming focus was claiming, without evidence, that he was the victim of massive fraud.
Trump prematurely declared victory on Wednesday and threatened to request the Supreme Court to intervene to stop the vote counting, but he has nonetheless continued.
Since then, his team has been deployed across the battlefield states challenging the results in court and organizing a series of press conferences where supporters filed complaints of wrongdoing.
“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted early Thursday, referring to his unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots in particular are fraudulent.
But while Trump demanded that the count be stopped in Georgia and Pennsylvania, where he leads, his supporters and his campaign insisted that he continue in Arizona and Nevada, where he lags behind.
The campaign has announced lawsuits in Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania and Michigan, where it has already been thrown out, as well as demanding a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden won by just 20,000 votes.
Bob Bauer, a lawyer for Biden’s campaign, dismissed the large number of lawsuits as “without merit.”
“All of this is meant to create a big cloud,” Bauer said. “But it is not a very thick cloud. We see through it. Also the courts and election officials.”
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