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The DONALD TRUMP CAMPAIGN team has filed lawsuits in various states as Joe Biden draws closer to being elected President of the United States.
Trump’s team has filed legal challenges in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Nevada.
His team is demanding better access for campaign observers at the centers where the ballots are counted. The team has also made unsubstantiated claims about absentee and mail ballots.
After winning victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, Biden has 264 votes in the electoral college and needs to secure one from Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina or his home state of Pennsylvania to reach the 270 votes needed to claim the nation’s top spot.
You can read the latest updates on the count on our live blog here.
The Trump campaign introduced a series of legal motions in Pennsylvania, including attempts to stop the vote count and allow members of the Republican Party to observe the vote count.
Democratic state governor Tom Wolf said Trump’s “attempts to subvert the democratic process are disgraceful.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said yesterday in a statement that the campaign would sue in Michigan to stop the ballot counting until it can have “meaningful access” to observe ballot processing and counting.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, Democrat, insisted that both parties and members of the public have had access to the recount and that “all ballots are counted fairly and accurately.”
The state Republican Party and the Trump campaign also sued in Georgia, asking a judge to remind poll workers that, under state law, late ballots, which arrive after 7 p.m. on Election Day , are not counted. The lawsuit claims that the late ballots may have been mixed up with the ballots that arrived on time, but there is no proof of this.
The Nevada Supreme Court rejected the Trump campaign effort Monday night to halt processing of mail-in ballots, allowing ballots to be processed as planned on Election Day.
You can read a full breakdown of the lawsuits, per NBC News, here.
‘Admitting defeat is not plausible’
Some legal experts have said that Trump’s lawsuits are an attempt to delay Biden’s election, rather than being based on genuine legal concerns.
“Admitting defeat is not a plausible reaction so soon after the election, so they throw a lot of Hail Mary lawsuits against the wall and hope something will stick,” Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg told CNN.
Franita Tolson, a law professor and CNN contributor, agrees, saying, “I think much of the litigation is unlikely and unlikely to be successful.”
He said he believes that “a big goal of this litigation is, in the short term, to change the narrative” from a possible Biden victory to a conversation about fraud, even if those claims are not supported by evidence.
Has anyone explained to Trump that filing lawsuits is not the same as winning them? 🤔
– Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) November 5, 2020
Marc Elias, the Democrats’ top election attorney, tweeted yesterday that the demands of the Trump campaign were “without merit.”
Protests
Trump supporters in some states have rallied to demand that the counting be stopped, while in others they insist that all ballots be counted.
After the president claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots in states like Michigan had fraudulently favored opponent Biden, Trump fans showed up at the TCF Center in Detroit shouting “let us in” and “stop the count.”
Local media reported raucous scenes as Republican counters attempted to enter the building, claiming they were being unfairly excluded, a claim denied by local Democrats that was also kept outside.
In contrast, pro-Trump protesters showed up at the counts in Nevada and Arizona demanding that all votes be counted.
Outside the counting center in Maricopa County, Phoenix, a crowd of Republican supporters, some armed with guns, gathered shouting “count the votes” and “Fox News sucks,” after the right-wing television network earlier called to Arizona in favor of Biden.
Observers from both parties were inside the polling place while the ballots were processed and counted, and the procedure was streamed live online at all times.
Several police officers blocked the entrance to the building and the vote counting continued into the night, said Maricopa County Elections Department spokeswoman Megan Gilbertson.
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Donald Trump supporters in front of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office in Phoenix yesterday.
Source: AP Photo / Matt York / PA Images
Two senior county officials, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, issued a statement expressing concern about how misinformation about the integrity of the election process had spread.
“Everyone should want all votes to be counted, whether they are sent by mail or cast in person,” said the statement signed by Clint Hickman, Republican Chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and Democratic Supervisor Steve Gallardo. “An accurate vote takes time. This is a test of democracy, not fraud. “
Meanwhile, thousands of Trump opponents took to the streets in cities across the United States demanding a full recount of the ballots.
In Portland, Oregon, which has been the scene of regular protests for months, Gov. Kate Brown called out the National Guard as protesters engaged in what authorities said was widespread violence. Protesters in Portland were demonstrating on a variety of issues, including police brutality and the counting of votes.
“It is important to trust the process and system that has guaranteed free and fair elections in this country throughout the decades, even in times of great crisis,” Brown said in a statement. “We are all in this together.”
In New York, hundreds of people marched past bricked-up luxury stores on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, and in Chicago, protesters marched down a street across the river from Trump Tower.
Similar protests, sometimes over elections, sometimes over racial inequality, took place in at least half a dozen cities, including Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and San Diego.
Contains reports from the Press Association
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