President Donald Trump, in his last sprint of rallies before Election Day, is aggressively accelerating his campaign to spread distrust in the US election and legal systems, laying the groundwork for a potential effort to stop counting votes after Nov. 3.
“The whole world, and our nation, is going to be waiting, and waiting, and waiting to hear who won? You’re going to be waiting for weeks?,” Trump asked a crowd of supporters Saturday morning in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
There has been a giant spike in early and mail-in voting nationwide because of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly — polls suggest, among Democrats. Because of how some key states like Pennsylvania count votes, that might mean that the election winner is not determined on election night, and it could mean that some states that count absentee ballots late may show initial results that have Trump winning, only for Joe Biden to overtake him as more votes come in. There’s nothing about that that would suggest fraud or illegality, and it’s not unusual for some states to take days to finalize a vote count. Trump, though, is now loudly insisting otherwise.
He repeatedly blamed the Supreme Court, which earlier this week denied Pennsylvania Republicans’ request to issue a decision on mail-in ballots before the election, punting the issue. That denial means that Pennsylvania can still count ballots that are postmarked by Election Day as long as they arrive by Nov. 6; Republicans had sued to stop them from counting anything that arrives after Nov. 3.
“This is a terrible thing they’ve done to our country. And that’s the United States Supreme Court I’m talking about. That is a terrible, political, horrible decision that they made. We’re going to be waiting, Nov. 3 is going to come and go and we’re not going to know,” Trump said. “And you’re going to have bedlam in our country, and you’re going to have this period of nine days or seven days or whatever it is, and many bad things — ballots are going to be, ‘oh we just found ten thousand ballots, oh that’s good, we just found another ten thousand.’ This is a horrible thing the United States Supreme Court has done to our country. And I say it, and I say it loud and I say it proud.”
“We have to know who won,” he said. “We have to know who won.”