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TRAVERSE CITY / PITTSBURGH (REUTERS) – US President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden made a desperate push for votes in battle states on Monday (Nov. 2) as their campaigns braced for disputes. post-election elections that could prolong a divisive presidential election. .
Trump, who lags behind in national opinion polls, has continued to launch unfounded attacks on mail-in ballots, suggesting he would deploy lawyers if states continue to count votes after Election Day on Tuesday.
Trump told reporters Monday night that Pennsylvania’s plans to count mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day would lead to widespread deception, though he did not explain how.
He urged the United States Supreme Court to reconsider its decision that left the extension in place. The court has left that possibility open.
“Bad things will happen and bad things will lead to other things,” he told reporters in Wisconsin, another battlefield state.
On Twitter, Trump said the court’s decision “would induce violence in the streets.” The social media platform flagged his post, adding a disclaimer to the tweet that its content was “disputed” and “could be misleading.”
It’s not unusual in the US for states to take several days or even weeks to count their votes, and a record increase in mail-in ballots could prolong the process this year.
“Under no circumstances will Donald Trump be declared the winner on election night,” Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon told reporters.
Biden himself predicted a quick victory, but also tried to downplay the drama. “I look forward to a simple and peaceful election with a lot of people running,” he told reporters in Pittsburgh.
The election has sparked an unprecedented wave of litigation over whether voting rules should be adjusted in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Both sides have assembled armies of lawyers who are prepared to face post-election battles.
On Monday, a federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican offer to discard about 127,000 votes already cast at self-service voting sites in the Democratic-leaning Houston area.
In Pittsburgh, Biden told his supporters that the future of the country was in his hands.
“When the United States votes, the United States is listened to. And when the United States is listened to, the message will be loud and clear: It is time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home, ”he said.
Trump, 74, seeks to avoid becoming the first incumbent president to lose re-election since his Republican colleague George HW Bush in 1992.
Despite Biden’s leadership in national polls, the swing state race is seen as close enough that Trump can still muster the 270 votes necessary to prevail in the state-by-state electoral college system that determines the winner.
Trump has spent the final days of the campaign predicting victory and ridiculing Biden for backing restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.
“A vote for Biden is a vote for lockdown, misery and layoffs,” he told the Scranton crowd.
‘A little worried’
Many Democrats said they were nervous about the results after expecting Trump to lose easily in 2016. “I’ll be honest, I’m a little worried,” said Patti Cadoso, 41, a medical school administrator who attended a rally organized in Miami by former Democratic President Barack Obama.
Obama, whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, said Trump’s push to stop counting votes on election night was undemocratic.
“That’s what a petty dictator does,” he said at a rally in Miami. “If you believe in democracy, you want all the votes to be counted.”
After visiting North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Trump headed to Wisconsin and Michigan, four states he narrowly won in 2016 but which polls show he could lean toward Biden this year.
As he has for months, the president addressed large crowds, where many attendees avoided masks and social distancing despite the resurgence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden, 77, who has made Trump’s handling of the pandemic a central theme of his campaign, spoke in Ohio and Pennsylvania in much smaller meetings.
The latest Reuters / Ipsos poll in Florida, an ever-changing state, showed Biden with a 50-46 percent lead, a week after the two were statistically tied.
Early voting has skyrocketed to levels never seen before in the US elections. A record 98.4 million early votes have been cast either in person or by mail, according to the US Elections Project.
The number equals 71.4 percent of the total voter turnout for the 2016 election and represents about 40 percent of all Americans who are legally eligible to vote.
That unprecedented level of early voting includes 60 million mail-in ballots that could take days or weeks to count in some states, meaning a winner may not be declared in the hours after polls close on Tuesday. the night.
Some states, including critics Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, slowing down the process.
Trump has repeatedly said without evidence that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud, although election experts say that is extremely rare in American elections. Voting by mail is a long-standing feature of American elections, and about one in four ballots were cast that way in 2016.
Democrats have promoted voting by mail as a safe way to cast a vote, while Trump and Republicans have a large in-person turnout on Election Day.
Bricked up shop windows
Twitter said Monday that it would attach a warning label to any tweets, including those of the candidates, claiming an election victory before state election officials or national media do.
In a sign of how volatile the election could be, store windows were closed with boards in cities like Washington, New York and Raleigh, North Carolina.
The FBI was investigating an incident in Texas when a convoy of pro-Trump vehicles surrounded a tour bus carrying Biden’s campaign staff.
The caravan, which Trump praised, prompted Biden’s campaign to cancel at least two of its events in Texas, as Democrats accused the president of encouraging supporters to engage in acts of intimidation.
Eight state attorneys general, representing Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, warned Monday that they would not tolerate voter intimidation.
Trump will conclude his campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place where his 2016 presidential race ended.
Biden ended his campaign on the offensive, traveling almost exclusively to the states Trump won in 2016.
He and his running mate Kamala Harris spent most of Monday in Pennsylvania, a state that is vital to the hopes of both presidential candidates. On Tuesday he will spend Election Day in Scranton, his childhood home, and Philadelphia.
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