The Trump campaign is prepping for a battle over still-incoming votes in Pennsylvania, as the President seeks to portray legally cast but still untallied ballots as illegitimate.
The President and his associates have sent multiple signals over the past hour that they’re moving into position to begin muddying the waters around the state’s ongoing count.
At 3:30 p.m., Eric and Lara Trump will hold a press conference in Philadelphia, the campaign announced. No topic for the presser was provided, but it will also include former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Corey Lewandowski, and comes as Philadelphia counts the remaining voted-in ballots.
President Trump has spent the past morning sowing confusion about the tally, which has Biden trailing the President by 449,000 votes with an estimated 64 percent of the vote counted, per AP.
They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar told CNN on Wednesday that “there’s still over a million ballots left to count” in the Keystone state.
Vote-counting is taking longer in Pennsylvania after the state GOP refused to pass legislation that would have allowed the state to begin counting votes before Nov. 3. Multiple Pennsylvania counties also said that they would not begin counting mail-in votes until Nov. 4, skewing the early, incomplete tally towards ballots cast on Election Day, and, thus, the Republican Party.
Trump appears to have seized on that remark in a bid to imply that the presence of additional votes is somehow illegitimate.
We are winning Pennsylvania big, but the PA Secretary of State just announced that there are “Millions of ballots left to be counted.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
Trump’s personal attorney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is on the case, as well.
Giuliani, who is known for brandishing his legal qualifications in bizarre and incongruous ways, said that he was “en route to Philadelphia with legal team” and suggested that he was trying to stop “Philly Democrat hacks” from stealing the election.
En route to Philadelphia with legal team.
Massive cheating.@realDonaldTrump up by 550,000 with 75% counted.
Will not let Philly Democrat hacks steal it!
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) November 4, 2020
Trump has said that he will seek to invalidate votes that arrive after Election Day. Early Wednesday morning, the President declared that he had won the election in a bid to cut off counting of votes in states where partial tallies showed him to be ahead, and added that he would go to the Supreme Court to seize a second term before votes had been counted.
Axios reported on Wednesday that Trump would “try to invalidate late-counted votes.”
“His advisers tell us Trump expects lawmakers and the courts to fall in line,” Axios reported.
