Trump: Campaign Going to Supreme Court to Halt Voting

Trump: Campaign Going to Supreme Court to Halt Voting
President Donald Trump speaks during election night in the East Room of the White House in Washington, early Nov. 4, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Zachary Stieber
11/4/2020
Updated:
11/4/2020

President Donald Trump said early Wednesday that his campaign will ask the Supreme Court to halt voting as he asserted he had won the 2020 election.

“We will be going to U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o'clock in the morning and add them to the list,” Trump told supporters at the White House in Washington.

Trump recounted winning Florida, Texas, and Ohio just hours earlier and pointed to leads he has in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

“It’s not like we’re up 12 votes and we have 60 percent left. We won states. And all of a sudden, I said, ‘what happened to the election?’ It’s off,” Trump said, referring to how some counties in crucial battleground states stopped processing ballots late Tuesday or early Wednesday.

“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he added, before bringing up the Supreme Court.

Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden arrives with his wife Jill to react to early results from the presidential election in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden arrives with his wife Jill to react to early results from the presidential election in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 4, 2020. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said in response, “The president’s statement tonight about trying to shut down the counting of duly cast ballots was outrageous, unprecedented, and incorrect.”

“The counting will not stop. It will continue until every duly cast vote is counted. Because that is what our laws—the laws that protect every Americans’ constitutional right to vote—require,” she added in a statement. “If the president makes good on his threat to go to court to try to prevent the proper tabulation of votes, we have legal teams standing by ready to deploy to resist that effort. And they will prevail.”

Trump said in September that he would respect a Supreme Court decision on the outcome of a contested election.
Trump’s Wednesday declaration came about 90 minutes after Biden suggested he was on his way to a victory, pointing to a disputed early call of Arizona in his favor, as well as the more solid projection of Minnesota for Biden.

Biden asserted he could win Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, despite deficits, and declared, “We’re going to win Pennsylvania.”

The former vice president told the crowd in Delaware that they should be patient as votes are counted, adding, “It ain’t over till every vote is counted.”

“But we’re feeling good. We’re feeling good about where we are,” Biden said.