Miffed Trump mounts legal challenges to vote tallying in uncalled battleground states.
With Democratic challenger Joe Biden on the cusp of winning the 2020 presidential election, President Donald Trump mounted legal challenges to vote tallying in some states to delay what seems the inevitable.
With only 214 electoral votes to Biden’s 264 by most counts, Trump needs to win all four uncalled battleground states in order to get to the 270 finish line and a second term.
But there are narrow margins in the uncalled states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina that stand between Biden and the Electoral College win.
Stopping short of declaring himself the victor, Biden Wednesday projected confidence that he would eventually win while demanding that the vote count must go on.
“I’m not here to declare that we’ve won, but I am here to report that when the count is finished, we believe we will be the winners,” Biden told his supporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
“Now every vote must be counted. No one is going to take our democracy away from us. Not now, not ever.
“America’s come too far. America’s fought too many battles. America’s endured too much to ever let that happen.”
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“We the people will not be silenced. We the people will not be bullied. We the people will not surrender,” Biden said.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign filed legal challenges to the vote-tallying process in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The campaign has also said it will seek a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden leads by roughly 20,000 votes, according to the Hill.
Trump’s legal challenges came as the Associated Press declared Biden the victor in Wisconsin and Michigan.
Biden has also begun to narrow his gap with Trump in Pennsylvania, which has not yet been called for either candidate.
Trump campaign has lined up a team of lawyers and sent out fundraising requests to supporters throughout Wednesday to fund what could become an expensive exercise.
Biden campaign attorney Bob Bauer told reporters they were prepared to fight any legal battles brought by Republicans but doubted any such challenges would be effective.
“We’re fully prepared for it because it’s almost as if they handed their strategic playbook to us and read it to us out loud,” Bauer was quoted as saying by the Hill.
Officials in several battleground states Wednesday continued to sort through and count millions of outstanding ballots that could tip the balance of the presidential race.
Early on Wednesday, prematurely declaring victory Trump had accused Democrats of “trying to steal the election” and threatened to go to the Supreme Court to prevent further “voting.”
Asserting he will have a “big win,” Trump tweeted, “We are up big, but they are trying to steal the election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the polls are closed.”
With counting still incomplete, Trump threatened to go to the Supreme Court to stop “voting” alleging there was fraud apparently confusing it with counting.
“This is a fraud on the American public, this is an embarrassment to our country,” he told supporters at the White House late at night.
“We’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any balance at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
“As far as I am concerned we already have won,” he said adding, “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything. And all of a sudden it was just called off.”
In response to Trump’s earlier tweet about a “big win,” Biden tweeted, “It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare the winner of this election. It’s the voters’ place.”
Twitter labeled Trump’s statement as “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”.