PRESIDENT Donald Trump has declared victory over Joe Biden and said he would ask the Supreme Court to intervene, even as several battleground states continue to count votes.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said after noting that he holds leads in several states that have not been called in his favour, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“Frankly we did win this election,” he said.
“So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
It wasn’t immediately clear what Trump meant, as states including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and others are counting legally cast votes. It is routine for states to continue counting votes after Election Day.
Trump delivered his remarks from the East Room of the White House, shortly before 2.30am in New York, to a crowd of more than 100 supporters, including his family.
Few if any of the people in the room wore masks to protect themselves from coronavirus infection.
Earlier, Biden said he feels good about his chances to win the presidency, cautioning supporters that it would take time to finish counting the votes.
“We believe we’re on track to win this election,” Biden told supporters in cars outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware. Just as he concluded his remarks, Trump responded in tweets.
Trump responded with a tweet saying that he was ahead and Democrats were trying to steal the election. Twitter placed a notice on the tweet saying that it was misleading.
In a sign of how close the race has been, the only Electoral College vote to flip so far came from a congressional district in Nebraska that backed Biden after favouring Trump in 2016.
“If there’s something to talk about tonight I’ll talk about it,” Biden said Tuesday afternoon at a campaign stop in Wilmington, Delaware.
“If not, I’ll wait till the votes are counted the next day.”
The Biden campaign sees multiple paths to victory, while Trump has a narrower route that includes recapturing Pennsylvania while protecting the other states he won in 2016.
A win for Biden in those states would all but guarantee him a victory. But the former vice president could also unseat Trump if he picks up traditional GOP bastions in the Sun Belt, like Georgia or Arizona.
Election officials in the Philadelphia suburbs echoed the same thought as hundreds of thousands of mail-in and absentee ballots are being processed.
The legal issue is whether the extension ordered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, relying on voter protections in the Pennsylvania constitution, violated the U.S. Constitution.
The argument advanced by Republicans is that the Constitution gives state legislatures — not state courts — the power to decide how electoral votes are awarded, including whether absentee ballots received after Election Day can be counted.
Roughly 20 states allow for late-arriving ballots, but Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature did not authorize an extension, even with the huge increase in mailed ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Similar ballot-deadline extensions have resulted in court fights in Minnesota and North Carolina.
(SOURCE: AGENCIES)
