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US President Donald Trump has claimed victory in the presidential election – and wants to have another vote count stopped by the country’s Supreme Court. “We won this election,” Trump said in the White House the night before Wednesday, although the outcome of the election is still open in several key states. The campaign team of challenger Joe Biden sharply criticized Trump’s statements.
As things stand, Trump accounted for 213 voters and Biden for 224. “Honestly, we won,” he said before supporters in the White House – although final results were not yet available from many important states. At least 270 voters are needed to win the election.
The incumbent spoke of alleged “fraud against the nation” and “against the American people” in the election, adding: “We will go to the Supreme Court. We want all voting to end.” Presumably Trump was referring to the ongoing counting of numerous postal votes.
Biden’s team rejected Trump’s statements about a possible halt to the counting of votes in the U.S. election as “scandalous” and “unprecedented. However, the Democratic challenger’s legal experts are prepared for a legal challenge, the Biden campaign team stated on Wednesday.
In some states – including the particularly contested Pennsylvania – postal votes with postmarks from election day are accepted even if they are received by the authorities a few days after the election. In recent months, Trump has repeatedly denounced alleged fraud in postal voting, although experts and officials strongly disagree.
Because of the Corona pandemic, this year a particularly large number of citizens have resorted to the possibility of postal voting – especially supporters of the Democratic Party of Trump challenger Joe Biden.
Although incumbent Donald Trump declared himself the winner, hundreds of thousands of potentially decisive votes had not yet been counted in many states. Journalists from major cities in the still-open states of Georgia and Pennsylvania reported on Twitter that counting would continue only after nightfall.
On Wednesday, the EU Commission expressed its confidence in the American election authorities. “We trust that there will be a result in due time,” said a spokesperson for the EU authority in Brussels. In the United States, he said, a “democratic process” was underway. “We stick to what the authorities say, and everyone should do so,” said the Commission spokesman.
At the Fox television station, a statistician said that he no longer expects results from Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania at night. In Pittsburgh and the rest of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, election officials plan to meet again at 10:00 a.m. local time (4:00 p.m. CET). From Philadelphia there had been reports that results could be announced there again from 9:00 a.m. onwards. Also in Atlanta in the state of Georgia the meeting was not to continue until the morning.
In some states of the USA the evaluation of the postal votes may only be started on election day, which leads to the delays. In some cases, the comparison of signatures with electoral registers is mandatory. In some other states, votes are also counted that are received a few days after the election. Here the postmark counts, which must be from the election day at the latest. The election officials of several states in the Midwest had announced in advance that correct counting could take a few days. The final results from North Carolina were also still open.
The week is also of decisive importance for global climate policy: on the one hand, the withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Climate Protection Agreement, as decided by Trump, came into force on Wednesday, and on the other hand, the outcome of the election will determine whether this decision, which has been the subject of much international criticism, will stand. If Trump’s democratic challenger Joe Biden wins the election, he could quickly ratify the Paris Accord again.
At the UN Climate Conference in Paris at the end of 2015, a global climate protection agreement was agreed upon, which came into force just under a year later. It provides for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees if possible, but at least to less than two degrees compared to the pre-industrial age.
Recently, positive signs for Joe Biden had increased in the morning. As expected, Biden won in the U.S. state of Maine, as the AP news agency reported on the basis of voter polls and initial vote counts. According to AP, Biden won at least three voters. In the 2nd district the race was not yet decided.
— hp, Source: APA. Picture: bbc.com
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