As President Trump’s reelection prospects continued to dim on Wednesday, his campaign launched an aggressive yet questionable strategy to keep Joe Biden from winning the state of Pennsylvania.
Trump’s campaign announced on Wednesday afternoon that it was suing to prevent the state from proceeding with tallying ballots there “to stop Democratic election officials from hiding the ballot counting and processing from our Republican poll observers,” the Associated Press reported.
The Trump campaign is also backing a Republican lawsuit filed with the U.S. Supreme Court that seeks to prevent legally cast mail-in ballots postmarked by a Nov. 3 deadline but that arrived after Election Day from being counted. So far, the Supreme Court has allowed Pennsylvania officials to continue counting those ballots.
With an estimated 83 percent of the ballots counted in Pennsylvania, Trump held a 352,000-vote lead over Biden, but that margin had fallen throughout the day as more votes were tallied. Democrats believe they have enough uncounted ballots to push Biden over the top in the state, snuffing out all hopes Trump might still have for winning reelection.
Knowing that their chances of victory are diminishing, Team Trump sought to stop the clock on Wednesday with a public relations offensive that was immediately flagged on Twitter as being potentially misleading.
While the Trump campaign also announced on Wednesday that it would seek a recount in Wisconsin, where Biden has been declared the winner, it simultaneously moved to halt the counting of votes in Michigan, where, with more than 98 percent of the vote counted, Biden leads Trump by a little more than 61,000 votes.
As for the legal maneuvers in Pennsylvania, officials in the state pledged to continue counting ballots.
“No one is going to rush anything. No one is going to be able to question the underlying validity of the results when they are finalized in Pennsylvania,” Lt. Gov. John Fetterman said in a Wednesday interview with MSNBC.
It remains to be seen whether the courts will come to Trump’s rescue in Pennsylvania, but legal experts remain skeptical that a strategy of pushing for the recounting of every vote cast in one state will square with attempting to halt the counting of legally cast ballots in others.
Culled from Yahoo news
