US President Donald Trump claimed early Wednesday that he had won the US election and, accusing rival Joe Biden’s Democrats of “fraud”, declared that he would go to the Supreme Court to dispute the counting of votes. “We were just about to win, in fact, we have already won,” Trump said in an extraordinary speech from the White House at 2.30 am.
The Biden camp called Trump’s bid to stop vote counting “outrageous and unprecedented”. The Democrat nominee’s legal teams are “ready to deploy” if Trump tries to halt vote count, said his campaign.
The President said the Republicans were about to celebrate a “beautiful” victory when “suddenly something happened”.
“We were winning in many other states and we were just about to declare it and then suddenly this fraud happened there. A fraud on the American people. And we will not let this happen,” said President Trump, asserting that he would go to court and “we want all voting to stop.” He appeared to mean stopping the counting of mail-in ballots, which can be legally accepted by state election boards after Tuesday’s election, provided they were sent in time.
“So, we are going to go to the US Supreme Court and ensure that suddenly new ballots are not mysteriously found at 4 am and added to their tally. Quite frankly this is a shame to America and to the millions of Americans,” he said, speaking from the East Room of the White House with Vice President Mike Pence and First Lady Melania Trump by his side.
“We will not let them get away with this. The results have been phenomenal… we are surely going to win. We are far ahead in the states where numbers are still coming in. They will never ever catch up with us,” he said.
Election results from some battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, are still not clear and projections from major networks show Trump, 74, still short of the 270 electoral votes need to win re-election. Trump won the key states of Florida, Ohio and Texas, erasing Biden’s hopes for a decisive early victory. Biden won Arizona, Virginia and New Hampshire among others.
Biden, 77, was eyeing the so-called “blue wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that sent Trump to the White House in 2016 for possible breakthroughs.
Earlier, the Democratic presidential nominee asserted that he’s on track to win the election, warning supporters that it would take time to finish counting the votes. “Keep the faith guys. We are going to win this (election),” Biden told a crowd in his hometown of Delaware.
