Washington: As President-elect Joe Biden is gearing up for administering the US, a defiant Trump campaign has asserted that the 2020 US presidential election is far from over. Donald Trump has indicated that he will explore all possible options to obtain ‘an accurate and honest vote count’. He has declined to concede the closely-fought November 3 presidential race to Democrat Biden.
Trump is mounting legal fights in several key battleground states. However, there has been no evidence of voter irregularities or widespread fraud in the elections.
The president’s refusal to accept the results means the election disputes could drag for weeks as states certify their tallies or push to mid-December, when the 538-member Electoral College is set to vote. Trump has made repeated and baseless claims that the Democratic Party has tried to steal the election.
According to several US media projections, Biden has won at least 290 electoral votes, 20 more than the required 270 out of the 538 Electoral College votes. Trump has received 214 electoral votes.
Since media projected Saturday that Biden had won the critical state of Pennsylvania, accumulating enough votes to claim the White House, the president-elect has forged ahead with his plans to take reins of the power.
Biden formed Monday a task force that will guide him on dealing with the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed over 236,000 lives in the US.
Biden cannot technically move to form a government using current government employees until his January inauguration, unless permission from Trump is granted to do so. Trump has not conceded to Biden or publicly accepted his loss.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany made unsubstantiated claims Monday of voter fraud.
“This election is not over, far from it. We have only begun the process of obtaining an accurate, honest vote count. We are fighting for the rights of all Americans who want to have faith and confidence not only in this election but in the many elections to come,” McEnany told reporters.
“There is only one party in America trying to keep observers out of the count room and that party is the Democratic Party. You don’t take these positions because you want an honest election. You don’t oppose an audit of the vote because you want an accurate count, you don’t oppose our efforts at sunlight and transparency because you have nothing to hide. You take these positions because you are welcoming fraud and you are welcoming illegal voting,” she claimed.
In Pennsylvania, she alleged, poll watchers who were legally permitted to be there and observe the vote count were blocked from observing the count.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also backed Trump Monday, saying the president is ‘100 per cent within his rights’ to question the election outcome.
The top Republican leader’s remarks were his first public comments since Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election.
Meanwhile, US Attorney General William Barr has told federal prosecutors that they should examine allegations of voting rregularities before states move to certify results in the coming weeks. But Barr’s unusual move has led to the resignation of the Justice Department’s top election crimes prosecutor.
Richard Pilger, director of the elections crimes branch in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, told colleagues in an email that the attorney general was issuing ‘an important new policy abrogating the 40-year-old Non-Interference Policy for ballot fraud investigations in the period prior to elections becoming certified and uncontested.”
Pilger also forwarded the memo to colleagues in his resignation letter, ‘CNN’ reported.