Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on Sunday said he doesn’t expect any election-altering changes in the days ahead but the country should still refrain from celebrating a presidential win by former Vice President Joe Biden until President Donald Trump submits his alleged proof that he won.
“It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts and then it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves,” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
Trump, who remains 56 electoral votes short of the 270 needed to win the presidency based on media projections, has repeatedly claimed he won the election and has accused the Democratic Party of “wrongdoing.” He has insisted that there are “valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
Blunt, the chair of Congress’ inauguration committee, said he wants to wait until after the election’s results are officially certified before making any declaration. He reasoned that it will be “much easier” for everyone to come together on the election’s results if “everybody feels like we went through a process and everybody was heard. Every legal vote was counted, every illegal vote was challenged and not counted. I think that happens pretty quickly.”
Elections are certified after every vote is counted and outstanding legal issues are resolved. Each state has its own deadline for certifying its results, with most having to be done by the end of November.
Blunt acknowledged that this process likely won’t make any meaningful difference, but stressed that it should still be done before a winner is announced.
“Seems unlikely that any changes could be big enough to make a difference but this is a close election and we need to acknowledge that,” he said.
The election was called on Saturday by The Associated Press and other media outlets after they determined Biden had won Pennsylvania, giving him the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. The AP has explained this call is only done when the trailing candidate does not have any possible path to victory.
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey (R), speaking on CBS News on Sunday, also said the media’s projection of Biden as the winner “is probably correct” but that Trump and his supporters have a right to request a recount in his state and sort out any lawsuits. That’s even with Biden being ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania by more than 40,000 votes, which prompted “Face the Nation” anchor Margaret Brennan to point out “that a recount really wouldn’t just change the math.”
“Pennsylvania law has an automatic recount, we should follow the law,” Toomey responded. “Now if it comes to a lead that’s outside of the automatic recount margin, then Pennsylvania law gives the losing candidate the opportunity to petition for a recount. The loser has to pay for it. And you’re right that recounts very seldom change the outcomes. I understand that. But there’s nothing wrong with following the process in the law.”
Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said Sunday that his team plans to file four or five lawsuits alleging voter fraud by the end of this week. One such lawsuit will claim that Trump secured enough votes to claim Pennsylvania ― which gave Biden 20 electoral votes ― alleging that hundreds of thousands of votes cast there were fraudulent.
“We’re at now 450,000 definite mail-in ballots that they separated from the envelope, threw the envelope away. We can never tell if they’re valid or not,” he said on Fox News, appearing to suggest that without the envelope it’d be impossible to tell whether the ballots were postmarked by Election Day, as required by law.