President Donald Trump refuses to concede the election following the victory of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement issued minutes after NBC predicted that Biden had become president-elect.
“Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor,” Trump said.
Trump mentioned that his team will begin “prosecuting our case in court to ensure election laws are fully upheld.”
Trump went to his private golf club in Sterling, Virginia, less than two hours before the U.S. elections were called for his rival.
Biden, in a statement released by noon Saturday, said he is “honored and humbled by the trust the American people have placed in me and in Vice President-elect [Kamala] Harris.”
“In the face of unprecedented obstacles, a record number of Americans voted. Proving once again, that democracy beats deep in the heart of America,” the president-elect said. “With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation.”
However, Trump refuses to concede the election, and his team has launched lawsuits in multiple key states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. They also hinted at a plan to call for recounts in some tight races.
Trump himself has mentioned unfounded accusations of electoral fraud in key states, despite pushback from election officials and judges in several court cases.
“Obviously he’s not going to concede when at least 600,000 ballots are in question,” Trump’s attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said at a press conference in Philadelphia on Saturday, without giving evidence.
Mail-in voting
On November 7, the Republican Party of Pennsylvania has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the mail-in ballots counting.
These ballots are received in Pennsylvania after Election Day. The request was released hours after Biden surpassed Trump in the vote tally.
Another request by the Republicans is for the Supreme Court to order the Pennsylvania secretary of state to log and classify those ballots, but to take no other action, including counting them, in the meantime.
On November 4, Trump claimed victory: “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off.”
“We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop,” Trump stressed more than an hour following the closing of the final U.S. polls in Alaska. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”
CNBC states that what Trump meant by “going to the Supreme Court” remains unclear since that the country’s highest court is hardly the first judicial authority for a case, but rather, it evaluates lower court rulings.
The Trump campaign was not able to respond to CNBC’s query.
