U.S. President Donald Trump early Wednesday claimed he had won the election, saying he was going to the Supreme Court to demand that all vote-counting stop while calling the election a “fraud on the American people.”
“Millions of people voted for us tonight. A very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people,” the president said from the East Room of the White House at 2.30 am. “And we won’t stand for it.”
“We were just about to win, in fact, we have already won,” Trump said.
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“We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop,” the president said, referring to the counting of mail-in ballots.
“We don’t want them finding any ballots at four in the morning and adding them to the list.”
Trump’s comments came after his rival Joe Biden told his own supporters he is “on track” to become the next president. “We feel good about where we are, we really do,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election.”
74-year-old Trump has won several critical swing states, including Ohio and Florida though he is still short of the 270 electoral votes need to win re-election. Biden led at 2.44 am eastern time with 225 Electoral College votes, compared to 213 for Trump, according to data from the Associated Press.
But election results from some battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, are still not clear.
Ahead of the election, legal experts warned of a possible contested presidential election following Trump’s voter fraud allegations and the fact that millions of Americans are voting by mail. Indeed, from Thomas Jefferson’s victory in 1800 to George W Bush’s win over Al Gore in 2000, the U.S. has a history of presidential elections that a vote alone couldn’t resolve.
