A day after several networks declared Democrat Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 US Presidential election, incumbent President Donald Trump renewed his Twitter-led attack casting doubt on the integrity of the election.
“We should look at the votes. We’re just beginning the tabulation stage. We should look at these allegations. We’re seeing a number of affidavits that there has been voter fraud. We have a history in this country of election problems,” Trump tweeted, quoting legal scholar Jonathan Turley.
While several affidavits have been filed by the Trump campaign in key swing states, there has yet to emerge credible evidence of voter fraud taking place on a large scale. Joe Biden is estimated to have beaten Trump by over 4 million votes. Twitter has flagged as misleading several of Trump’s tweets since Election Night for the same reasons.
“In Pennsylvania you had an order by a Supreme Court Justice to compel them to separate ballots that were received after the legislative deadline. It required the intervention of Justice Alito. That’s a large group of ballots. When you talk about systemic problems, it’s about how these ballots were authenticated, because if there’s a problem in the system about authentication, that would seriously affect the ENTIRE ELECTION,” Trump continued.
“And what concerns me is that we had over a hundred million mail-in ballot in cites like Philladelphia [sic] and Detroit with a long series of election problems (to put it mildly),” he tweeted, tagging Turley.
All of Trump's tweets were later flagged by Twitter with the disclaimer, "This claim about election fraud is disputed".
Turley has argued that the US has “a history of premature election calls” and that, while there is “currently no evidence of systemic fraud in the election”, there is “ample reason to conduct reviews”.
The Associated Press called the victory for Biden after late-counted ballots in Pennsylvania put him above 0.51 percentage points above Trump, a margin that has since increased. Though around 62,000 ballots remain to be counted, AP called the victory for Biden; the “overwhelming majority” of mail ballots that had been counted were votes for Biden. Throughout the campaign, Trump had lambasted the mail-in ballot system, likely leading Republicans to vote in-person, while Democrats opted largely to vote by mail.
Over 100 million ballots were cast by mail this election, the largest ever.
With Pennsylvania, Biden is certain to clinch the election, regardless of the outcome of other states still in play. However, AP has also called the election for Biden in Arizona and Nevada, with only Georgia remaining as a possible addition of electoral college votes for Biden.
In order for Trump to win, the outcome of his legal challenges must be to flip Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona to his favour. This remains an unlikely prospect, due to the lack of concrete evidence of largescale voter fraud. The Trump campaign has, however, pointed out procedural lapses in the election in Pennsylvania, leading to some provisional ballots being set aside until officials can determine if they were validly cast. Should Biden’s margin over Trump be reduced to below 0.5 per cent, Pennsylvania law demands an automatic recount.
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Saturday said, shortly after Biden announced victory, that he would not concede the election while “at least 600,000 ballots are in question”—claims the New York lawyer has yet to back up.
However, CNN reported sources saying Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has approached the president about conceding the election. Biden and Kamala Harris have said that they received no communication from the Trump camp since the race was called.