US election 2020: Donald Trump lashes ‘corrupt’ voting process
Donald Trump says widespread corruption in vote counting is stealing the election from him and must be stopped by the courts.
Donald Trump says widespread corruption in the counting of votes is stealing the election from him and must be stopped by the nation’s courts.
In his first appearance before the television cameras since election day, Mr Trump showed no sign of backing down on his claim of victory, saying he was being cheated out of a win by a corrupt system, without producing any evidence to substantiate the claim.
“If you count the legal votes I easily win. If you count the illegal votes they can try to steal the election from us,” he said.
“They are trying to steal an election, they are trying to rig an election and we can’t let that happen.”
“We will not allow the corruption to steal such an important election – we can’t allow anyone to silence our voters.”
Mr Trump cited a litany of allegations about Republican election observers being kept away from the count and mysterious ballot boxes appearing in the dead of night full of Biden votes. He claimed mail-in votes were being counted without postmarks or names attached to them.
His comments came as he faces a likely election loss as mail-in votes in four undecided states heavily favour Mr Biden, eroding the lead the president held on Election night.
He said those workers counting votes in Democrat cities like Philadelphia and Detroit were “engineering the outcome of a presidential race”.
He said mail-in voting was a corrupt practice that was initiated by Democrats so that they could manipulate the outcome.
“Mail in voting has really destroyed our system, it is a corrupt system...they wait to find out how many votes they need and they find them,” he said.
“Democrat officials never believed they would win this election honestly that’s why they did mail-in ballots.”
“We are hearing stories that are horror stories, and we can’t let that happen to the United States.”
Mr Trump complained of how his election night leads in Georgia and Pennsylvania all but vanished as mail-in votes came in.
His lead in Georgia has been slashed to just 3,500 votes while in Philadelphia it has fallen to 64,000 votes. Democrat voters are known to prefer mail-in voting, partly because of Covid safety fears, while Republican voters preferred to vote in person this year. This is why states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia that are still counting mail-in ballots are leaning toward Mr Biden after first showing a majority of support for Mr Trump. But Mr Trump refused to acknowledge this fact in his tirade.
The President said he would try to save the integrity of the election through the courts.
“There is a lot of litigation, there is a tremendous amount of litigation because of how unfair this process was,” he said.
“It’s going to end up perhaps in the highest court in the land...because we can’t have an election stolen like this.”
Mr Trump said that when the courts examined the problems, he would end up winning the election fairly.
“We think we will win the election very easily,” he said.
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