4th November, 2020
U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign will immediately request a recount of votes in Wisconsin, which rival Joe Biden appears to have clinched.
“There have been reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results,” campaign manager Bill Stepien said.
He didn’t provide details of any reports.
“The President is well within the threshold to request a recount and we will immediately do so”.
The recount demand is one of the dramas of the U.S. presidential election, which hung in the balance on Wednesday, with Democrat Joe Biden leading in two critical Midwestern states.
The states could tip the contest in his favour even as President Donald Trump falsely claimed victory and made unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud.
Biden extended his narrow lead in Michigan while maintaining a slight edge in Wisconsin on Wednesday, according to Edison Research.
The Republican president won the two pivotal battleground states in 2016.
Michigan officials continued to count mail-in ballots that surged amid the coronavirus pandemic. Wisconsin officials said they concluded their counting, but a winner had yet to be declared.
Together with Nevada, another state where Biden held a small advantage with votes still left to be tallied, those states would deliver Biden the 270 votes needed in the state-by-state Electoral College to win the White House.
But Trump still had a path to victory with those states officially undecided.
In duelling conference calls with reporters, officials from each campaign insisted their candidate would prevail.
“If we count all legal ballots, we win,” Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said, potentially setting the stage for post-election litigation over the counting of mail-in ballots.
Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon told reporters the former vice president was on track to win the election, while senior legal adviser Bob Bauer said there were no grounds for Trump to invalidate lawfully cast ballots.
“We’re going to defend this vote, the vote by which Joe Biden has been elected to the presidency,” said Bauer, adding that the campaign’s legal team was prepared for any challenge.
Biden was expected to deliver an address later on Wednesday.
Trump continued to make baseless attacks on the vote-counting process on Twitter on Wednesday, hours after he appeared at the White House and declared victory in an election that was far from decided.
Both Facebook and Twitter flagged multiple posts from the president for promoting misleading claims.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said before launching an extraordinary attack on the electoral process by a sitting president.
“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 U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim of fraud and did not explain how he would fight the results at the Supreme Court, which does not hear direct challenges.