The battle over the vote played out on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, which has not finalized it vote count in the presidential race, as President Donald Trump’s campaign has asked to intervene in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case over whether Pennsylvania should be permitted to accept late-arriving ballots sent by Election Day.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf has vowed that “every vote is going to count.” He said, “I’m gonna fight like hell to protect the vote of every Pennsylvanian. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that every vote counts.”
The Trump campaign has also filed lawsuits in Michigan and Pennsylvania seeking to halt vote counting, arguing that officials had failed to allow fair access to counting sites.
Taken together, Trump’s legal manoeuvres amounted to a broad effort to contest the results of an election yet to be decided a day after millions of Americans went to the polls during the coronavirus pandemic that has upended daily life. They followed Trump’s early-morning attacks on the integrity of the vote, as the president falsely claimed victory and suggested without substantiation that Democrats would try to steal the election.
Democrat Joe Biden said on Wednesday he was headed toward a victory over rump in the U.S. election after claiming the pivotal Midwestern states of Wisconsin and Michigan, while the Republican incumbent opened a multi-pronged attack on vote counts by pursuing lawsuits and a recount.
Wisconsin and Michigan were giving Biden, the former vice president who has spent five decades in public life, a critical boost in the race to the 270 electoral votes in the state-by-state Electoral College needed to win the White House. Trump won both states in his 2016 election victory. Losing them would narrow his path to securing another four years in office.
