Trump talks legal action while Biden goes on attack
Donald Trump has cast doubt in advance of the results of today’s election, while Democratic challenger Joe Biden went on the offensive ahead of a vote that could have consequences for the United States for years to come.
After the president threatened legal action on Sunday to stop vote counting in some crucial states such as Pennsylvania, his campaign released a statement yesterday accusing Democrats of trying to" subvert state deadlines for receiving and counting ballots".
If Pennsylvania ballot counting takes several days, as is allowed, Mr Trump claimed "cheating can happen like you have never seen".
At the same time, revealing some of his re-election concern, he told supporters at a North Carolina rally that he "could lose" distant Wisconsin, a battleground state he carried four years ago.
Mr Bid en dipped into Ohio, a show of confidence in a state the president won by eight percentage points four years ago. The ch allenger reiterated the central message of his campaign: that Mr Trump cost lives by mismanaging America's response to the worst pandemicina century.
"The first step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump ," the Democrats aid in Cleveland.
On the eve of the election, the US is at across roads, gripped by a historic pandemic that is raging in nearly every corner of the country, and a reckoning over race.
Both campaigns insist they have a pathway to victory, although Mr Bid en' s options for picking up the required 270 electoral colle ge votes are mo rep len tiful. Mr Trump is banking on a surge of enthusiasm from his most loyal supporters in addition to potential legal manoeuvres.
The president was spending the final day sprinting through five rallies, from North Carolina to Wisconsin. Beyond Ohio, Mr Biden was devoting most of his time to Pennsylvania, where a win would leave Mr Trump with an exceedingly narrow path to victory.
More than 93 million votes have already been cast, through early voting or mailin ballots, which could lead to delays in counting. Mr Trump has spent months claiming - without evidence-that the votes would be ripe for fraud while refusing to guarantee that he would honour the election result.
He has used stark terms to threaten litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after election day - counting that is allowed with earlier postmarks in some states. As soon as polls close in battlegrounds, "We're going in with our lawyers", Mr Trump said on Sunday.
It was unclear precisely what he meant. There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that are received in the mail in the three days after the election.
The state' s top court ordered the ex tension, and the Supreme Court refused to block it, though conservative justices expressed interest in taking up the propriety of the three added days after the election.
Those ballots are being kept separate in case the litigation goes forward. The issue could assume enormous imp ortance if the late arriving ballots could tip the outcome.
Under the shadow of possible legal battles, Pennsylvania loomed as the most important battleground.
For Mr Bid en, who was born there and lives in neighbouring Delaware, Pennsylvania has long been a focus
of his campaign, a bulwark to block Mr Trump from securing the electoral votes needed for re - election.
Mr Biden and his running mate K am al a Harris and their spouses were crisscrossing the state yesterday, hoping to deliver a knockout blow big enough to ave rt a legal challenge.
Mr Trump once led comfortably in Ohio, but Mr Bid en announced on Sunday during his national team's daily call that he planned to return to the state at the urging of senator Sherrod Brown, who said he and other Ohio Democrats in Congress had encouraged it, suggesting a final late visit could win.
That trip comes after Mr Biden's ticket has pushed into other formerly reliable Trump strongholds including Georgia, where the Democrats' most popular surrogate, former president Barack Obama, was campaigning on Monday.