Joe Biden has taken the lead in the official vote count in Pennsylvania and Georgia, but the Trump campaign insisted Friday morning it’s too early to call a winner.
“This election is not over,” said Trump campaign general counsel Matt Morgan in a statement. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
Biden also is leading in Nevada and Arizona, while Trump is still ahead in North Carolina. If the Democratic nominee were to prevail in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, he would match Trump’s electoral vote total of 306 in 2016.
But the Trump campaign said Biden “is relying on these states for his phony claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be reelected.”
The Biden campaign responded, warning Trump could be escorted from the White House.
“As we said on July 19th, the American people will decide this election,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
The Trump campaign presented an overview of the states it is still contesting.
Georgia is “headed for a recount, where we are confident we will find ballots improperly harvested, and where President Trump will ultimately prevail.”
In Pennsylvania, “there were many irregularities,” including “having election officials prevent our volunteer legal observers from having meaningful access to vote counting locations.”
The campaign noted it won a court challenge Thursday to obtain “meaningful” access to monitoring, but said it was “deprived of valuable time and denied the transparency we are entitled to under state law.”
In Nevada, “there appear to be thousands of individuals who improperly cast mail ballots.”
And in Arizona, the campaign said Trump “is on course to win Arizona outright, despite the irresponsible and erroneous ‘calling’ of the state for Biden by Fox News and the Associated Press.”
WND reported Thursday polling guru and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver believes the determinations by Fox News and the Associated Press that Biden won the state of Arizona should be retracted.
Georgia election officials said Friday morning there will be a recount, and they might not certify the election until the end of November.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said the race is “too close to call,” with an expected margin of a few thousand votes out of about 5 million cast.
“The final tally in Georgia obviously has huge implications for the entire country. The stakes are high and emotions are high on all sides,” he said.
He noted that “in some states there are complaints about monitors not being allowed to watch the count.”
“In Georgia, this process is and will remain open and transparent to monitors. If any member of the public raises legitimate concerns, we’ll investigate those,” Raffensperger said. “We are committed to doing anything and everything to maintaining trust in our elections process for every Georgian, regardless of partisan preference.”
Trump: ‘If you count the legal votes, I easily win’
At a news conference Thursday night at the White House, Trump said he would not “allow corruption to steal” the election.
“We think there’s going to be a lot of litigation because we have so much evidence, so much proof, it’s going to end up perhaps at the highest court in the land, you’ll see,” he said. “We think there’ll be a lot of litigation, because we cannot have an election stolen like this.”
Trump said his warning during the campaign that mail-in ballots opened the election to fraud proved true.
“Democrat officials never believed they could win this election honestly. I really believe that that’s why they did the mail-in ballots, where there is tremendous corruption and fraud going on,” he said.
The president said there were many “shenanigans,” such as Trump election observers being prevented from monitoring ballot counts.
“If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us,” Trump said.
See Trump’s news conference Thursday night:
