Trump bid to stop vote counting ‘outrageous’ & ‘unprecedented’ – Biden camp

4 Nov, 2020 09:01 / Updated 4 years ago

Donald Trump’s promise to shut down the presidential vote count was a “naked effort” to strip Americans of their democratic rights, Joe Biden’s campaign manager has said.

“The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect,” Biden’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

It was outrageous because it is a naked effort to take away the democratic rights of American citizens. It was unprecedented because never before in our history has a president of the United States sought to strip Americans of their voice in a national election.

Earlier on election night, Trump claimed that there were widespread attempts to disenfranchise “millions and millions” of his voters.

“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 US Supreme Court,” Trump said. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning.”

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Biden’s campaign manager insisted that the vote counting “will not stop,” and will continue “until every duly cast vote is counted.” She said that this is what US law prescribes to do to protect Americans’ right to vote.

Biden’s staffer stated that, if Trump follows up on his threat to go to court to “prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort.”

A total of 21 states and Washington, DC will count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day on November 3. For example, Pennsylvania, a key battleground state with 20 Electoral College votes, will count the ballots that arrive by November 6.

Trump has long accused Democrats of using mass vote by mail to rig the election. Last week, he expressed hope that courts will not allow the states to “take a lot of time after November 3 to count the ballots.” He echoed the same sentiment at a campaign event on Sunday, arguing that “it’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.”

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