As votes were still being counted, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday made false claims of victories in several key states and said he intended to go to the Supreme Court to stop vote counting.
Trump’s election night speech reminded Twitter users of an interview US Senator Bernie Sanders gave last month.
Counting is still underway in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Several states also allow mailed-in votes to be accepted after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked by Tuesday, AP reported. That includes Pennsylvania, where ballots postmarked by 3 November can be accepted if they arrive up to three days after the election.
Trump suggested those ballots shouldn’t be counted while Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said every vote needed to be counted and urged supporters to be patients.
While addressing a crowd of supporters at the White House, the US President falsely claimed victory and said. “We were getting ready to win this election, frankly we did win this election.”
“We want all voting to stop, we don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. It’s a very sad moment. We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned we already have won,” HuffPost quoted him as saying.
Trump’s claims were called out by several news organisations. MSNBC’s Brian Williams interrupted broadcast of Trump’s speech to point out that the US president’s claims about already winning the election were “not based in the facts at all.”
NPR tweeted that the President’s claims were “wrong”.
Twitter users were reminded of Sanders appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last week explaining why the election results will take longer than usual.
“My view is every vote must be counted,” he said and added that he suspects that states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin are going to receive huge amounts of mail-in ballots.
“Unlike states like Florida and or Vermont, they are not able to begin processing those ballots until election day or maybe when the polls close. That means you are going to have states dealing with perhaps millions of mail-in ballots.”
Sanders said, “Here is my worry. What polls show and what studies have shown is that, for whatever reason, Democrats are more likely to use mail-in ballots. Republicans are more likely to walk into polling booths on election day.”
The Senator continued to say that it’s likely the first votes that will be counted will be of those people who came in on election day, which will be Republicans.
“And here is the fear. It could well be, I don’t know what’s going to happen, that at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, and he gets on television and says, ‘Thank you, Americans for re-electing me. It’s all over. Have a good day.’ But then the next day and the day following, all those mail-in ballots start getting counted and it turns out that Biden has won those states.”
Sanders said that at this point, Trump may say that the “whole thing was fraudulent and mail-in ballots were crooked” and will refuse to leave office.
Several users said that Sanders predicted what was going to happen: