Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden says President Donald Trump will not “steal” the presidential election.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Biden was reacted to the report by Axios that said Trump plans to declare victory on election day if it looks like he is “ahead.”
He said, “My response is the president is not going to steal this election.”
Watch the video below:
Asked about Trump and allies signaling they’re going to declare victory on Tuesday night, Biden says, “My response is the president is not going to steal this election.” pic.twitter.com/jyorjq6JYZ
— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) November 1, 2020
As states expanded access to mail-in voting, experts cautioned that Americans should expect that they will not know the winner of the election on election day.
The U.S. Elections Project reports that 33,975,872 mail-in ballots have already been returned. In several key states, election works cannot begin processing mail-in ballots until election day — which will prolong the time it takes for all the ballots to be counted.
On Sunday, Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported that the president has privately said that he will declare victory on Nov. 3 if it looks like his “ahead” in the results.
However, speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trump denied that he would prematurely declare victory, but added, “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.”
“I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election. … We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”
“We don’t want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy … We don’t want to be in a position where he’s allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots,” he added.
Pennsylvania’ secretary of state told NBC News’ “Meet The Press” on Sunday that it will be a “matter of days” until all the ballots are counted, as IJR reported.
While Trump denied he would declare victory before the results are finalized, Democratic operatives fret that results in key swing states will favor Trump and slowly shift in favor of Democrats as election workers count the mail-in ballots.
In the meantime, they fear the president would try to declare victory and claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 are fraudulent.