US Election 2020: Trump Falsely Declares Victory

US President Donald Trump declared victory early Wednesday in the American presidential election — a claim entirely unsubstantiated by the results, which were still being tallied.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” said Trump from the White House, alleging, without evidence, that Democrats were perpetrating widespread electoral fraud that he said the US Supreme Court will be asked to stop.

“So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” he said.

He appeared to mean stopping the counting of mail-in ballots that can be legally accepted by state election boards after Tuesday’s election, provided they were sent in time. It was unclear exactly what legal action he might try to pursue.

By early Wednesday, neither candidate had the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win. 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.

Several states allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by November 3 can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.

Trump suggested those ballots shouldn’t be counted. But Joe 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.”

Trump carried Florida, the nation’s most prized battleground state, and he and Democrat Biden focused early Wednesday on the three Northern industrial states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that could prove crucial in determining who wins the White House.

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.