President Trump’s top legal adviser said Friday the campaign intends to challenge alleged voting irregularities in four battleground states where vote counting is still underway, as the campaign braces for Democratic nominee Joe Biden to be declared the winner of the election.
“This election is not over,” said Matt Morgan, the general counsel for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. “The false projection of Joe Biden as the winner is based on results in four states that are far from final.”
Biden is on the cusp of reaching the 270 electoral votes he needs to be the next president. Behind the scenes, network data analysts are crunching the numbers in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada to determine when they can make the final projection about Biden’s victory.
The final vote count in the key states may not be known until late Friday, over the weekend or even next week. But in some states, Biden could build up an insurmountable lead. In others, the outstanding mail ballots and votes being counted in heavily Democratic areas could make it clear that Biden is going to be the winner.
Trump ran up early leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia, which have emerged as Electoral College tipping point states. Biden has surpassed Trump in both states as mail ballots and votes from urban areas are counted. Trump cannot win the White House without Pennsylvania, which could be called in Biden’s favor at any moment.
Sensing the race has moved against him, the president on Thursday night gave remarks from the White House in which he made false and unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, voting irregularities and corruption in places where he is losing.
Trump has called on vote counting to stop in places where Biden is doing well and says he intends to take the election to the Supreme Court to decide the outcome.
The Trump campaign has been flooding the battleground states with lawsuits with mixed results. There is no evidence of the kind of widespread fraud the president and his team are alleging and in some instances, their challenges center around only dozens of ballots or are an effort to give them closer proximity to vote counters.
Morgan said the campaign will likely request a recount in Georgia, where the candidates are separated by only hundreds of votes. He claimed that the campaign will find ballots in the Peach State — which has a Republican governor and secretary of State — that were “improperly harvested.”
In Pennsylvania, the campaign won a court battle to allow its election monitors to move a few feet closer to vote counters. The campaign is also expected to challenge a state Supreme Court ruling that allows ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 to be received by Friday. Election officials say the number of ballots in that three-day window has been inconsequential so far.
In Nevada, where Biden has a small lead, the Trump campaign claims that thousands of individuals “improperly cast mail ballots.”
And in Arizona, the campaign believes Trump will claw his way back on top when the final vote is tallied despite the election desks at Fox News and The Associated Press already having called the state for Biden.
“Biden is relying on these states for his phony claim on the White House, but once the election is final, President Trump will be reelected,” said Morgan.
Some Republicans are furious with Trump for undermining faith in the election and casting suspicion on nonpartisan poll workers.
They say if Trump and his team have evidence of fraud and irregularities, they need to produce evidence of it in court, rather than fanning the flames of suspicion with baseless allegations that are dividing the country.
“We want every vote counted, yes every legal vote, of course,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). “But, if you have legit concerns about fraud present evidence and take it to court. Stop spreading debunked misinformation. … This is getting insane.”