POTUS lays ground to contest election outcome, wins first legal battle in Pennsylvania
Democrat Joe Biden pushed closer on Thursday to the 270 Electoral College votes he needed to win the White House, securing victories in the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan and narrowing President Donald Trump’s path to reelection.
With just a handful of States still up for grabs, Trump tried to press his case in court in some key swing States. In spite of the aggressive Republican move, the flurry of court action did not seem obviously destined to impact the election’s outcome.
However, Trump scored the first legal battle in the battleground State of Pennsylvania wherein an appellate judge has ordered that poll watchers must be allowed within six feet of counting of votes.
“Big legal win in Pennsylvania,” Trump said in a tweet soon after the court gave the ruling.
Trump is currently leading in Pennsylvania, but his vote count has reduced considerably over the last one day.
Trump Campaign Manager Bill Stepien told reporters during a conference call that the court ruling would allow them to review the counting that has already occurred as well. The Trump Campaign on Thursday filed a lawsuit in the battleground State of Nevada, alleging mass level electoral malpractice.
Nevada is the fourth State where the Trump Campaign has filed a lawsuit. Trump, who has 214 votes so far, has filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and demanded recounting of votes in Wisconsin.
Two days after Election Day, neither candidate had amassed the votes needed to win the White House. But Biden’s victories in the Great Lakes States left him at 264, meaning he was one battleground state away — any would do — from becoming President-elect.
Trump, with 214 electoral votes, faced a much higher hurdle. To reach 270, he needed to claim all four remaining battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada.
Trump’s campaign engaged in a flurry of legal activity to try to improve the Republican president’s chances and cast doubt on the election results, requesting a recount in Wisconsin and filing lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. Statewide recounts in Wisconsin have historically changed the vote tally by only a few hundred votes; Biden led by more than 20,000 ballots out of nearly 3.3 million counted.
Biden had an edge nationally over Trump after victories in Wisconsin and Michigan, key Midwestern battleground states. Contests in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina were tight with votes still being tabulated.
The Trump campaign said it was confident the President would ultimately pull out a victory in Arizona, where votes were also still being counted, including in Maricopa County, the State’s most populous area.
With millions of votes yet to be tabulated, Biden already had received more than 71 million, the most in history. At an afternoon news conference Wednesday, the former vice president said he expected to win the presidency but stopped short of outright declaring victory. “I will govern as an American president,” Biden said. “There will be no red states and blue states when we win. Just the United States of America.”
Democrats scoffed at the legal challenges the President’s campaign filed on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. And the flurry of court action did not seem obviously destined to affect the election’s outcome.
However weary Americans will have to wait for some more time to know the clear winner of the closely-fought election between Trump and Biden, as the final outcome hinged on a few states on Thursday where a flood of mail-in ballots triggered by the coronavirus pandemic were still being counted.
“The Associated Press continues to watch and analyze vote count results from Arizona as they come in,” said Sally Buzbee, AP’s executive editor. “We will follow the facts in all cases.”
For four years, Democrats have been haunted by the crumbling of the blue wall, the trio of Great Lakes states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that their candidates had been able to count on in presidential elections. But Trump’s populist appeal struck a chord with white working-class voters and he captured all three in 2016 by a combined total of just 77,000 votes.
The candidates waged a fierce fight for the states this year, with Biden’s everyman political persona resonating in blue-collar towns while his campaign also pushed to increase turnout among Black voters in cities like Detroit and Milwaukee.
It was unclear when a national winner would be determined after a long, bitter campaign dominated by the coronavirus and its effects on Americans and the national economy. The U.S. on Wednesday set another record for daily confirmed cases as several states posted all-time highs. The pandemic has killed more than 233,000 people in the United States.
Trump spent much of Wednesday and Thursday in the White House residence, huddling with advisers and fuming at media coverage showing his Democratic rival picking up battlegrounds. Trump used his Twitter feed to falsely claim victory in several key states and amplify unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Democratic gains as absentee and early votes were tabulated. Aides did not say when he next planned to appear in public.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said the president would formally request a Wisconsin recount, citing “irregularities” in several counties. And the campaign said it was filing suits in Michigan and Pennsylvania to halt ballot counting on grounds that it wasn’t given proper access to observe. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said additional legal action was expected in Nevada.
“We will literally be going through every single ballot,” he said of the hotly contested state.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of votes were still to be counted in Pennsylvania, and Trump’s campaign said it was moving to intervene in existing Supreme Court litigation over counting mail-in ballots there.
Friday, 06 November 2020 | AP/PTI | WASHINGTON
