While President Donald Trump has been pushing allegations of widespread fraud in the election as the count tilts against him, some Republicans have come forward to say that they see no evidence that those allegations hold water.
Asked if there is anything strange or nefarious about the fact that his state has spent three days counting votes, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) said during an NBC “Today” interview, “certainly not that I’m aware of. We had a massive quantity of mail-in ballots.”
He explained “election officials did a tremendous amount of work to be prepared to process this but they weren’t allowed to start until Election Day. And the process is somewhat labor-intensive. So it is taking a long time. It’s going to take the time that it takes.”
Toomey said that he watched Trump’s speech on Thursday night and called it “very hard to watch,” adding, “The president’s allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated. I’m not aware of any significant wrongdoing here.”
Watch the video below:
Watch @SavannahGuthrie’s full interview with @SenToomey, who says he sees no evidence of fraud in the election and that President Trump still has a very narrow path to victory in Pennsylvania. pic.twitter.com/YVJ5Bq7tyC
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) November 6, 2020
The president claimed on Thursday, “In Pennsylvania, partisan Democrats have allowed ballots in the state to be received three days after the election and we think much more than that. And they’re counting those without even postmarks or any identification whatsoever.”
Trump has called for the counting of ballots to stop and his campaign has sued to keep ballots from being counted.
Many of the ballots that are being counted in the final stretch of the procedure are mail-in ballots, which appear to slant heavily toward Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and the president spent the months before the election casting doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots.
But a judge denied the Trump campaign’s request to halt the counting of ballots in Pennsylvania and by Friday morning, Biden had taken the lead over the president in the Keystone state.
Trump’s campaign has been fighting in the courts to try to stop the counting of votes in other states too. They have sued in Georgia to stop the counting of ballots and in Michigan.