The Joe Biden campaign called Donald Trump’s White House speech on Tuesday night “outrageous” and “incorrect.”
The United States President prematurely declared victory on election night despite the fact that voting is still underway in many key states. According to CNN , Biden’s camp refuted those claims, with campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon calling the move 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,” she said in a statement, as per The Guardian .
“It was incorrect because it will not happen. The counting will not stop. It will continue until every duly cast vote is counted. Because that is what our laws — the laws that protect every Americans’ constitutional right to vote — require,” O’Malley Dillon added.
The statement reiterated what the former Vice President had already said in regards to the election outcome, that it will not be decided by any of the candidates but by the American people. Earlier in the night, Trump attempted to claim victory by calling for a halt to all legitimate vote counting that is currently underway across the country, falsely claiming that Democrats were trying to “steal the election.”
The move was an unprecedented one, with a longtime Republican election lawyer deeming the President’s speech as a “distressing moment” and a “call to disenfranchise” many voters.
“[Trump’s claim] is not only unprecedented and it not only lacks any basis in the law, it really is a disservice to all the other men and women who are on the ballot as Republicans today,” veteran attorney Ben Ginsberg said, according to CNN .
Ginsberg also said that all votes should be counted before any victory declarations, and that he had never seen a U.S. President display such type of behavior.
Trump’s words were premature because the race was still too close to call in some key states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. During his speech in the East Room, he baselessly claimed that a fraud was being committed, and also threatened to take the election results all the way to the supreme court.
The outcome of the 2020 presidential race is still in the balance at the time of writing, with Trump securing key states Florida, Ohio and Texas, while Biden managed to flip longtime Republican state Arizona, as previously reported by The Inquisitr .
Joe Biden now has a narrow lead in Wisconsin after City of Milwaukee absentees come in. Still 32,000 absentees left to come in from Green Bay, a Democratic city. pic.twitter.com/BRaMofcZpn
— Reid J. Epstein (@reidepstein) November 4, 2020
This year’s presidential election registered the highest voter turnout numbers in a century, with many states changing the rules in order to allow voters to cast their ballots ahead of time as a precaution measure against the Covid-19 pandemic, as Bloomberg explained.
