President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.
Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.
In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is “rigged” against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.On Sunday, the President stoked fears of a disputed election that could have corrosive long-term effects by raising the false argument that results not declared on an election night were somehow illegitimate. Many US elections have gone past midnight on Election Day. It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.
In another ominous comment, the President said that as soon as voting was over in states like Pennsylvania, “We’re going in with our lawyers,” after railing against a Supreme Court decision that left in place for now a decision by Pennsylvania’s top bench to allow the counting of ballots up to three days after Election Day.