U.S. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, said “a very sad group of people” is trying to disenfranchise millions of his supporters who voted for him, and that “this is a fraud on the American public.”
“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said as votes continued to be counted. “A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise” the millions of people who voted for Trump, the Republican president said in a statement at the White House.
“They knew they couldn’t win, so they said, let’s go to court,” Trump said, noting that he predicted this, and said he would go ask the Supreme Court to terminate the counting of votes.
Election laws in all U.S. states require all votes to be counted. More votes still stood to be counted this year than in the past as people voted early by mail and in person in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press has projected that Biden won, becoming the second Democratic presidential candidate since 1948 to win the longtime Republican stronghold.
Four years after Trump became the first Republican in a generation to capture that trio of states, they were again positioned to influence the direction of the presidential election. Trump kept several states, including Texas, Iowa and Ohio, where Biden had made a strong play in the final stages of the campaign.
Trump carried Florida, the nation’s most prized battleground state, and he and Democrat Joe Biden were increasingly focused early Wednesday on the three Northern industrial states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that could prove crucial in determining who wins the White House.
The tight overall contest reflected a deeply polarized nation struggling to respond to the worst health crisis in more than a century, with millions of lost jobs, and a reckoning on racial injustice. Trump and Biden have spent the better part of this year in a heated fight over how to confront those challenges, and each has argued in apocalyptic terms that his opponent would set the country on a devastating path.
By early Wednesday, neither candidate had the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
Biden, briefly appearing in front of supporters in Delaware, urged patience, saying the election “ain’t over until every vote is counted, every ballot is counted.”
“It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who’s won this election,” Biden said. “That’s the decision of the American people.”
Source: ABC news
